NAZRAELI PRESSONE PICTURE BOOK TWO13

100ONE PICTURE BOOKONE PICTURE BOOK TWO500127x178mm5x7100

In the early 1980s, returning to Japan from a few years of traveling and living in Europe, Toshio Shibata began photographing night scenes of roadside Japan. Shibata has said of the experience of the road at night: While driving on a highway at night in Europe I often experienced an imperceptible momentary sensation of transcending place, yet not knowing where I was. It seemed as if I could have been in Japan, or even in the United States. I felt that the scene was non-specific, but rather a kind of generic or archetypal common scene, universal image and part of a global world-view.

Gas stations especially in the dead of night look more or less the same everywhere they are to be found. Yet their generic look can also provoke feelings of melancholy, even romance.

Well known for his large-scale photographs of large-scale civil engineering in rural places, both in Japan and in the West, Toshio Shibata here presents the view with a book of seven jewel-like images of Japanese gas stations at night, beautifully reproduced and accompanied by a silver gelatin photograph, hand printed by the artist himself.

Toshio Shibata occupies a distinct place in landscape photography: His pictures don’t idealize pristine wilderness nor do they moralize about the damaging imprint humans leave upon the natural world. Shibata studies places of contact where we have altered the earth and finds reflection, wonder, awe.

Beauty, in his work, is inclusive, and purity is a matter of compositional elegance rather than rarefied subject matter. Leah Ollman, Los Angeles Times

One Picture Book Two: an upgraded, upscaled follow-up to NAZRAELI PRESS’ much-loved One Picture Book series of artists books. Each title is limited to 500 numbered copies, and includes a removable, signed, original print measuring approximately 5×7 inches. The books are slightly larger than those in the original series, with a fresh design and upgraded materials.