Grand Coulee Dam, Douglas County, WA

Since the mid-1970s, Toshio Shibata has been making photographs that explore the intersection of the competing forces of nature and humanity within the landscape. Not simply an indictment of the ways humanity harnesses nature for its own ends, Shibata emphasizes instead the interplay of organic and industrial elements. From 1995 to 1997, on a commission from Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Shibata photographed dams, such as this one, North America’s largest concrete structure. Water has been a central focus in Shibata’s work—he feels that it actively shapes the land, much in the way a waterworks project might, or a photographer the material before his lens.

This work augments the Smart’s holdings of modernist abstract photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, such as those of Aaron Siskind, as well as American landscape photography from the nineteenth century to the present day.