Although trained as a painter and printmaker in Japan, Toshio Shibata turned to photography to highlight the painterly aspects of the built environment. Shibata’s preferred subjects of engineered dams, rivers, and waterfalls center on the rectilinear shapes of brick walls or concrete slabs, emphasizing their overt signs of construction. Each of the images reveals human efforts to control water. Yet, the dynamic streams or soft swirls resist such hard lines, flowing over the geometric bounds of the structures. He finds a kind of natural beauty in these obviously manmade forms. Rather than idealizing pristine nature in his photographs, Shibata celebrates an ideal of hybridity between humans and their environment.