Click images to enlarge

Signed copy of the book and a signed and numbered original gelatin silver print in a clamshell box. Edition of 25.

“The end of the 1970s saw the completion of Japan's postwar construction, as well as a withering of the student movement and the various terrorist acts that had shaken the global community. The early 1980s was a brief interlude of calm, anticipating the end of the long Showa era, before Japan was deluged by the bubble economy. 

I had just returned to Japan in 1980, after studying for four years in Flanders where time moves slowly, and the atmosphere is very relaxed. In addition to the rapidly advancing westernization, the reality of this new Tokyo, where old pre-war Showa is blended with modern Showa (post-war) looked disorderly and chaotic to me, and it was not easy to capture it visually. I struggled to realize my own mode of expression in this home country of mine, and began by chasing lights of the night-time to deflect this chaos.” – Toshio Shibata, from the Afterword

Born in Japan in 1949, Toshio Shibata entered the painting department of the University of Arts of Tokyo in 1968. He later decided to continue his studies in Europe at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Gant (Belgium) where he turned to photography. It was upon his return to Japan in 1980 that he made the haunting, nighttime photographs of Tokyo presented here for the first time.

Toshio Shibata’s work is included in the permanent collections of museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Victoria and Albert Museum; London; Bibliothèque National, Paris; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; and The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Yodaka is Toshio Shibata’s seventh monograph to be published by Nazraeli Press.