Noriyoshi Shibata was born in Nagasaki City in 1966. He moved to Tokyo after graduating from high school, and has lived there ever since. He acquired a bachelor’s degree in aesthetics and art history at Keio University, and then accumulated four years of experience as a news photographer with Kyodo News.

He became a freelance photographer in 1995, and posted photos mainly of people’s life in Tibet, China, and India to　numerous magazines. In particular, he has been visiting Tibet to take photos since late 1980s, and published a collection, “Tibetans”, in 2002.

He also held an exhibition in Tokyo in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, with the economic gap in Chinese society as its theme. Besides, he published photos of Chinese AIDS patients and shang su (direct appeal) villages in newspaper and magazines.

So far, he has published works with a journalistic approach as mentioned above, however, in recent years, he has also undertaken creative activities with a classical technique called “alternative process photography” since he happened to see the works and was impressed by them.

Among many 19th-century techniques, the printing-out paper process (sun printing) is Shibata’s current favorite. The technique involves making a contact print on paper to which he has applied his self-made photographic emulsion, after processing photos taken on 8 x 10 inch film into digital negatives in a PC. “The fusion of primitive techniques and a modern digital technology is interesting. Now that digital cameras are in common use, photo taking with a large-scale camera and sheet film is a very exciting and enjoyable experience”, he says.