“Iizaka Town, Fukushima, 2006,” by Toshio Shibata. Via Eye Curious.

I take a lot of photographs and show very few. If there is too much reality, too much identifiable sense of time and place, I don’t show these images. I have taken around 4,000 plates with my 8 x 10 camera and of those I show about one percent. I try to eliminate the reality, time and any sense of specific place. Of course this is extremely difficult with photography. Within a frame there are so many elements that are present and you cannot choose those that you want to keep and those that you want to eliminate. The only elements that you can control are contrast and tonality, light essentially. With painting all the ‘unnecessary’ parts in a scene can be eliminated. With photography, you just have to accept what is there. That is where the difficulty of photography lies. Photography is not something that you can make. It cannot be forced. You have to accept the subject.

Toshio Shibata is a wonderful photographer whose work we have discussed before. I recently came across a fascinating interview with him on Eye Curious via One by Four by Nine.

The discussion of Shibata’s influences (including Adams, Meyerowitz, and Warhol) is enlightening; the Group f/64 connection in particular surprised me, although in retrospect, it probably should not have. It’s just that the western photography (such as the New Topographics) which seems closest in content and style to Shibata’s work is associated with a rejection of Group f/64, etc., in favor of photographers more associated with the documentary, like Walker Evans.

Shibata was coming from the other direction, moving away from the “social protest” documentary photographers of postwar Japan and toward the landscape styles associated with the American West, and but he arrived in a similar place in photographing the “man-altered landscape.” (Of course, it would be very incomplete to say that Shibata is just doing New Topographics style photography in a Japanese context; there are significant differences in his approach, most obviously in the degree of abstraction.)

But my favorite part of the interview is this sentence:

Photography is not something that you can make. It cannot be forced. You have to accept the subject.

I think this is particularly relevant given the recent back-and-forth in the blogosphere on the Paul Graham essay. One aspect of that discussion is the tension between “straight” photography and photography in which the subject is manufactured or performed by the photographer.

When Shibata says, “photography is something you cannot make,” he is obviously talking about “straight” photography, and he is highlighting what I think is the most important aspect of straight photography — that it involves a confrontation and, ultimately, reconciliation between the photographer and the world; it is basically anti-solipsistic, even when it is engaged in abstraction or when it is infused with the emotions or inner demons of the photographer. This is what Minor White called, “the camera’s strongest point—the magic of its tether to visual reality.”