Toshio Shibata, Day for Night, 2023

Day for Night collects 70 largely unpublished photographs made by Shibata between 1980 and 1988.

The sequence interweaves night photographs with others taken during the day, but the apparent simplicity of the work ends there: the night scenes, characterized by the almost theatrical presence of intense light sources, seem like the subject of a Hopper painting, dreamlike and evocative. The photographs taken during the day, on the contrary, are pregnant with points of shadow, with the dark tones of trees and rocks rooting our eyes in the reality of the present, in sharp contrast to the atmosphere of suspension that characterizes the night images.

In Day for Night, the roles of light and shadow are reversed. “The title gives the book another level,” says Shibata, who continues: “I discovered this technique as a kid, the day the film ‘Rawhide’ was shown on TV, but until now I had never seen my work from this perspective.”

The result is a book that confuses and surprises, not only viewers, but also its author.