There are two wires. That's the thing I keep coming back to. They enter at the top left corner, dead straight, and they sag very slightly as they run down toward the little crucifix of a telephone pole that's the only upright thing for miles. Everything else in the picture is dissolving — the road into dust, the mountains into a smear of mauve, the sun into its own glare — but those two wires hold their nerve. Somebody strung them. Somebody is presumably, at the far end of them, watching television.
Hido shot this in 2004, almost certainly through a car window, which is more or less his entire method: drive, find the hour when the light goes strange, don't get out. You can feel the windshield in the softness. The sun sits low and orange on the right like a streetlamp that's been overfed, and the whole right half of the frame is just light eating detail, while the left half stays a dusty pink road you could walk down if you wanted to walk into nothing in particular. This is the famous Hido register — the foreclosed America, the in-between places — and prints from these landscape series anchor his books and the collections at SFMOMA and the Whitney.
What gets me, though, is how unspectacular it insists on being. No house, no figure, no incident — the title is just a number, 3333, a frame in an archive. And yet I find I don't want to leave. The road keeps offering to take you somewhere and the dust keeps declining to say where. Maybe that's the whole transaction: you supply the destination, the picture supplies the going.
There are two wires. That's the thing I keep coming back to. They enter at the top left corner, dead straight, and they sag very slightly as they run down toward the little crucifix of a telephone pole that's the only upright thing for miles. Everything else in the picture is dissolving — the road into dust, the mountains into a smear of mauve, the sun into its own glare — but those two wires hold their nerve. Somebody strung them. Somebody is presumably, at the far end of them, watching television.
Hido shot this in 2004, almost certainly through a car window, which is more or less his entire method: drive, find the hour when the light goes strange, don't get out. You can feel the windshield in the softness. The sun sits low and orange on the right like a streetlamp that's been overfed, and the whole right half of the frame is just light eating detail, while the left half stays a dusty pink road you could walk down if you wanted to walk into nothing in particular. This is the famous Hido register — the foreclosed America, the in-between places — and prints from these landscape series anchor his books and the collections at SFMOMA and the Whitney.
What gets me, though, is how unspectacular it insists on being. No house, no figure, no incident — the title is just a number, 3333, a frame in an archive. And yet I find I don't want to leave. The road keeps offering to take you somewhere and the dust keeps declining to say where. Maybe that's the whole transaction: you supply the destination, the picture supplies the going.