Todd Hido

Unfinished Narratives

On view: January 17 – February 27, 2006

Todd Hido makes color photographs using available light and long exposures. His early subjects were contemporary quotidian suburbia, empty of people and otherworldly, suggestive of abandonment and isolation. The work in his newer Roaming series appears arrestingly different than that in Hido’s previous two groups of images. Hido has moved out of the suburbs—he is literally roaming about a somber, moody, rain soaked countryside. It is as if, having spent so many nights outside the eerie, brightly lit suburban tract homes featured in House Hunting and Outskirts, he has suddenly put his foot on the gas pedal and driven into the next day. But these landscapes continue Hido’s mastery in portraying the most mundane scenes with a menacing air of expectancy. These pictures, often taken through a car windshield, are so effective in creating tension they might almost have been staged. But in fact they are taken “as seen;” the telegraph poles, the straggling tree, the road leading nowhere are all exactly as encountered by Hido as he drove through Eastern Washington State, the California Central Valley, Indiana, Ohio, South Louisiana and beyond.

Todd Hido is a San Francisco-based artist whose work has been featured in ArtForum, The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim, NYC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum and many others. The editions of his books of photographs, House Hunting, Outskirts, and Roaming, have all sold out. His latest book, Dark Quarters, will be released in Fall 2006 from Nazraeli Press.