Weather Fronts: Reggie Shiobara (Photo Book)
- Photographer: Reggie Shiobara
- Curator: Takayuki Fujii
- Book Designer: Tadao Kawamura
- Publisher: Reggie Shiobara Studio
- Paperback: 132 pages
- Year: 2016
- ISBN: 0692747788 / 978-0692747780
- amazon.com
- The photobook, WEATHER FRONTS features 96 color images taken by Reggie Shiobara and focuses on his activities after 2012, when he began traveling Eastern Europe to find imagined pre-WWI scenes, moving to Central and Western Europe, and finally through the U.S. and Japan including his mother's hometown, Chiba. The photographs shown are taken during this period, yet he does not disclose the exact location. He presents a variety of images such as flowers, graves, trees, rainbows, walls and reflections that become in"reality" through his lens. According to Shiobara, "As in our social media landscape, there is no front or rear in my photographs. However, this photobook can be figuratively shown like weather fronts you sense everyday." Selected from his ongoing photography series, WEATHER FRONTS constructs a cognitive attitude toward the current media landscape. Recently, Shiobara has drawn his attention to activities seeking an alternative perspective and interpretation to our current social media situation through questioning how possibly people can 'touch" reality through the camera lens --as the Internet erases the interfacial boundary between reality and virtuality. Susan Sontag once remarked that in the 20th century people can only see reality through a lens. However today, virtuality exceeds reality even more, especially after September 11, 2001, when people in the world experienced the surrealism in which there is no clear line between reality and virtuality. There would be no front, nor rear battle line for reality anymore after seeing the twin towers collapse in the middle of the city in such an intense moment.Since moving to New York in 2009, Shiobara worked as an assistant photographer for Annie Leibovitz, who has been a significant figure in American portrait photography since 1970's. Best known for herrepresentation of beauty and contradiction in the world, her indelible portraits have captured celebrities,intimate family moments (including the birth of her daughter at age of 51), the death of her partner SusanSontag and even war documentation.