Photographer and writer Beth Shibata

In the picture, there’s a story
Through marshes and pines with photographer Beth Shibata

Was another year going to slip by without my writing about Beth Shibata? Almost, but not quite, and especially not after the Redondo Beach resident and photographer had work shown in New York and Barcelona. Furthermore, just this month, one of her photographs received an honorable mention at the Palos Verdes Art Center (in a show juried by Ruth Weisberg, artist, professor, and former Dean of the USC Roski School of Art and Design).
The latter image (“Did We Have Fun!”) was taken near Lone Pine and is part of an ongoing series that Shibata has tentatively titled “The Owens Valley Suite.” She’s been going up there for about ten years with the Henry Fukuhara Workshop, which consists mostly of plein air painters and is headed up by Ron Libbrecht who runs the APC Fine Arts Gallery in Old Torrance. (For many years, the late Fukuhara held annual painting workshops at the Manzanar Relocation Camp, a tradition APC continues)
Currently, Shibata is a member of PADA, the Photographic and Digital Artists group that is based in Palos Verdes. She’s been with them for a decade or so, and the approximately 30 photographers associated with it have at least one thing in common: they’re pushing the photographic medium in many directions and in the process coming up with surprisingly compelling results.
“There are a number of ways to work with photographic images,” Shibata says. “If you get a really exciting and exquisite straight image, that’s absolutely wonderful.” However, she adds, “Sometimes you have an image that evokes other ideas and it doesn’t quite do it on its own, so you (ask yourself), Where am I going with this? What is it telling me? What’s the story? And then (you) work to bring out the story that is in there, in the image.”
But how does one go about doing that?
“The image will tell me what it wants,” Shibata replies. “It’s almost like the same thing that happens when writing fiction. You have a setup, you get it started, and sometimes the characters tell you where they want to go.”

Between mountain and molehill
Wait, hold on, how did we jump from the click of a shutter to the click of a pen?
Apart from her photographic skills and interest, Beth Shibata was involved with the Southwest Manuscripters for a number of years, two-and-a-half of which she served as the group’s president. These days, apart from writing poetry, she contributes the Aikido Club column that appears in the Venice Community News, the monthly newsletter of the Venice Japanese Community Center.
On occasion, the poetry and the photography meet one another halfway. Or as Shibata phrases it: “Sometimes the image pushes the photo and sometimes the photo pushes the words. I let it figure its own way.” At other times they share the stage rather than push each other off of it.
“A while back I did a series of images from the Madrona Marsh, with a little chapbook that (consisted of) photographs and poems that connect to them.” Shibata also authored a book, “Billy and the Bullfrog,” with illustrations by Lisa Chakrabarti.
She’s often taken her camera to this nature preserve east of the Del Amo Mall, a tiny enclave with wildlife (the preserve, not the mall!) that is easy to pass by while cruising down Sepulveda, but which is a gem for many in the local community. And that includes visual artists of all stripes.
“If you’re looking for something that’s eye candy, that looks like one of those gorgeous scenes from the National Parks, it’s not going to come anywhere near that,” Shibata says. “But if you can go in and look for the moments, seek out the things that are there, it’s a place of wonder.”
For example, like crouching down and watching the harvester ants: “You kind of have to wonder, what do they think about this huge shadow that’s just looming over them? What are the effects of the things around me and their effect on me? It’s the kind of thing that triggers my imagination.
“The Marsh is an ongoing thing,” Shibata says of her frequent visits there. “It’s actually a great mental refuge.”
And if offers a slightly different experience depending on the season.
“This is going to sound rather East Coast snarky, but I always think of Southern California as having only three seasons–spring, rain, and fire.” If “spring” in this equation seems out of place, then rain, fire, and mud. Black humor aside, Shibata is fully aware of the little changes, the cycles, that repeat themselves in California just as they do on Long Island, New York, where Shibata is from, before moving permanently to California in 1975.
“We have four seasons out here, too,” she says. “They’re a lot more subtle, but they’re really here. It’s just a matter of looking for it.”

Observation, and sensibility
“For the longest time I shot flowers,” Shibata continues, “mostly because I didn’t always have the opportunity to get out, run around and go places because of work and family constraints. So, I would shoot flowers. And a friend of mine said (in a tone clearly dismissive), ‘Gee, that’s all you’re ever doing is shooting flowers?’”
But one of Shibata’s favorite photographers, Ernst Haas, has a quote along the lines of there’s so much in a flower that he never gets tired of taking their picture. When she read that, Shibata was overjoyed: “If he’s okay with that, I’m okay with that.”
Which also led us to reminisce about Jamie Lavalley, an astonishing photographer of flowers and mutual friend who lived in Old Torrance and sadly passed away about a year ago. Fortunately, I did write about him and his art for Easy Reader on two occasions. Hint: check out the archives.
Apart from acknowledged masters like Haas, Shibata has had other influences, but among them the most profound and lasting would have to be Japanese art and culture.

“In a number of ways it’s the fact that I’ve been studying the martial arts for many years, kind of because it’s a physical thing, an emotional and spiritual kind of thing.” Much of the Japanese aesthetic “tends to creep into the work a lot of times.”
I think we can credit that largely to her husband, Jim, who was born in San Francisco and lived on Terminal Island until the U.S. entered World War II and, Shibata says, “booted out the people living there.” Jim’s family wasn’t sent to one of the relocation camps, but instead went to stay with relatives in Utah where, overnight, “they went from being city folks to farming folks.” (A few years ago Jim was cast in one of my adventures as Tanaka-san, a reclusive arts connoisseur living in Kyoto; there’s a photo of us in the Oct. 18, 2012 edition of this paper. A collector’s item, it scarcely need be said.)
Well, here it is, another wet and icy winter in the South Bay as the year winds down to its final hours. Ah, 2017, leaving so soon? Asked what she’ll be up to in 2018, Shibata offers a succinct reply: “Learning new techniques and (doing) more experimentation.” As for the pictures she’ll take and develop, “The images talk to me and I try to communicate back, and hopefully communicate to other people as well.” I think she’s done a very good job of that so far.
More at bethshibata.com. ER

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