France

Todd Hido

Todd Hido is a San Francisco Bay-Area based photo artist  most recognised for his night photographs depicting deserted suburbs and roadsides. He draws much of his inspiration from the past and seems to recall random snapshots from his childhood and the atmosphere of the American suburbs where he grew up. In the series "House Hunting" Hido has photographed the insides of empty, tractstyle homes and the outsides of similar houses whose glowing window-panes signal their habitation. Seldom has suburbia looked spookier and more forlorn. The portraits of women posing in desolate rooms give off the impression of rootlessness, isolation, desertion, loss and of inevitable end. We do not learn the names of the women or venues ? the images could have been taken anywhere in the world and at any point in time. His new photographies, brought together in a book called « Road Divided », in which the artist again focuses his attention on the American landscape. Driving lonely roads on the outskirts of cities, Hido creates poignant images filled with inexplicable gravity, cinematic scenes of places that somehow exist in our collective memory. In these new pictures, Hido demonstrates his fluidity within the daytime realm, putting aside the harder edge that characterizes his night work by photographing through veils of rain or ice. Delicately, potently, embracing the beauty of the pictorial, Hido's new pictures present an image plane that is often fully disintegrated, recalling impressionist painting. With an unquestionably modern effect, he often frames the compositions from inside his car, photographing straight through the windshield, using it as an additional lens and bringing a sense of timing and moment to these stationary scenes.

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