Toshio Shibata, Boundary Hunt, 2021

Boundary Hunt, by Japanese photographer Toshio Shibata, is a series produced in Japan and the United States between 2000 and 2004, a period during which the artist was experimenting with new techniques and shifting his focus to colour photography after two decades of working in black and white. For Boundary Hunt, Shibata used Polaroid Type 55, a black-and-white positive-to-negative film that could be developed to produce a negative, which could then be enlarged.

From his early days as a photographer in the early 1980s, Shibata identified infrastructure as his subject of choice, as it is both evocative of the contemporary world whilst remaining timeless.

The title of the series evokes both the intersection between the natural and artificial worlds where Shibata situates his practice, and the unusual border created by the Type 55 film around the image. After a few initial experiments, Shibata decided to incorporate these borders into the images of the series, as they seemed to enter into a dialogue with these landscapes blending natural elements and concrete. A hunt that continues at the boundary of these two worlds.

The book Boundary Hunt contains 34 black-and-white photographs, most of which are published here for the first time.