1987 by Toshio Shibata

In the lead-up to the 1989 World Design Exposition in Nagoya, the visionary gallerist Etsuro Ishihara—founder of the Zeit-Foto Salon—invited renowned photographer Toshio Shibata to embark on a series of journeys through Egypt and Turkey.

The photographs gathered in this volume are the quiet yet resonant echoes of that commission, all taken in 1987 during Shibata’s second passage through the surreal terrain of Cappadocia and along Egypt’s Aswan Western Agricultural Road—a route that threads beside the Nile for more than 400 miles, from Cairo to Luxor, tracing the canal that shadows its western bank.

Captured five years before his first published works, and offering a rare turn toward portraiture, these images reveal a formative moment in Shibata’s practice. Faced with unfamiliar geographies and cultures, his lens begins to trace the visual language that would later define his art: a tension between nature and the constructed world, rendered with quiet intensity and a painter’s command of light.

Even in these early photographs, we see the shaping of a vision—measured, deliberate, and unmistakably his.