She's driven those patent heels so far into the white carpet that the toes have nowhere left to go, and they point inward, slightly pigeon-toed, the way a kid stands when asked a question they'd rather not answer. Two stilettos, black and wet-looking as oil, kneeling into a pile so deep and clean it could be snow, or the inside of a cloud. Nobody kneels like that to relax. They don't look comfortable, and I can't stop following them.
Hido shot this in 2011 for "Excerpts from Silver Meadows," that long, dreamlike trawl through a place that's half Ohio childhood and half invention. Most people know him for the houses — the suburban windows lit up at dusk like televisions left on for nobody. Here the house is gone and a body has taken its place, cropped at the waist, kneeling on a quilted satin headboard the colour of old wedding dresses. The sheer black briefs do exactly what his lit windows do: they let you see in and refuse you anything to actually look at. Concealment that advertises itself, which is more or less the whole erotics of the thing.
What gets me is the carpet. All that vacant white pushing up against the figure, the same way his empty roads and fogged fields push against the houses. He's found the loneliness he's always chasing and put it indoors, on a bed, in the gap between those two ridiculous, beautiful heels. You came for the body and you're left, somehow, thinking about the carpet, and the snow it isn't, and how far those heels have to travel to get anywhere — which is the whole trick, and he knows it, the way he always seems to know exactly where the sadness in a room is hiding.
She's driven those patent heels so far into the white carpet that the toes have nowhere left to go, and they point inward, slightly pigeon-toed, the way a kid stands when asked a question they'd rather not answer. Two stilettos, black and wet-looking as oil, kneeling into a pile so deep and clean it could be snow, or the inside of a cloud. Nobody kneels like that to relax. They don't look comfortable, and I can't stop following them.
Hido shot this in 2011 for "Excerpts from Silver Meadows," that long, dreamlike trawl through a place that's half Ohio childhood and half invention. Most people know him for the houses — the suburban windows lit up at dusk like televisions left on for nobody. Here the house is gone and a body has taken its place, cropped at the waist, kneeling on a quilted satin headboard the colour of old wedding dresses. The sheer black briefs do exactly what his lit windows do: they let you see in and refuse you anything to actually look at. Concealment that advertises itself, which is more or less the whole erotics of the thing.
What gets me is the carpet. All that vacant white pushing up against the figure, the same way his empty roads and fogged fields push against the houses. He's found the loneliness he's always chasing and put it indoors, on a bed, in the gap between those two ridiculous, beautiful heels. You came for the body and you're left, somehow, thinking about the carpet, and the snow it isn't, and how far those heels have to travel to get anywhere — which is the whole trick, and he knows it, the way he always seems to know exactly where the sadness in a room is hiding.