Black-and-white is a decision here, not a default. Hido works mostly in colour, so the monochrome of this portrait announces a shift in register, toward the studio-lit glamour of an earlier era and the cinema it evokes. A young woman stands before dark foliage in a sheer white headscarf and a tweed coat, a string of pearls just visible, her gaze cast to one side. The styling is deliberately mid-century, and the debt to Hitchcock's cool, imperilled blondes is impossible to miss.
The picture is a study in constructed nostalgia. Everything, the veil's translucence, the period coat, the grain of the film, is arranged to summon a memory of images rather than of life, the woman a figure who has stepped from a film still into a garden at dusk. Hido stages the scene precisely so we recognise it as staging, the borrowed glamour held at a slight, knowing distance.
From Excerpts from Silver Meadows and issued as an archival pigment print on Dibond, the work sits within the tradition of the tableau, where photographers rebuild the look of found or filmic imagery to interrogate our appetite for it. The sideways glance is the pivot: apprehensive, elsewhere, it lends the constructed image a genuine unease. The surface is immaculate; the feeling it carries is not.
Black-and-white is a decision here, not a default. Hido works mostly in colour, so the monochrome of this portrait announces a shift in register, toward the studio-lit glamour of an earlier era and the cinema it evokes. A young woman stands before dark foliage in a sheer white headscarf and a tweed coat, a string of pearls just visible, her gaze cast to one side. The styling is deliberately mid-century, and the debt to Hitchcock's cool, imperilled blondes is impossible to miss.
The picture is a study in constructed nostalgia. Everything, the veil's translucence, the period coat, the grain of the film, is arranged to summon a memory of images rather than of life, the woman a figure who has stepped from a film still into a garden at dusk. Hido stages the scene precisely so we recognise it as staging, the borrowed glamour held at a slight, knowing distance.
From Excerpts from Silver Meadows and issued as an archival pigment print on Dibond, the work sits within the tradition of the tableau, where photographers rebuild the look of found or filmic imagery to interrogate our appetite for it. The sideways glance is the pivot: apprehensive, elsewhere, it lends the constructed image a genuine unease. The surface is immaculate; the feeling it carries is not.