Todd Hido

Behind a dense lattice of bare branches, the moon burns through a ceiling of amber cloud and lays a broken column of light across a distant stretch of water. The trees stand between us and the scene like a screen or a net, their twigs threaded across the whole frame, so that to reach the lake with the eye is to pass through a thicket first, the branches inscribing themselves over everything beyond.

Hido tints the night a rich sepia-orange, closer to the palette of a nineteenth-century albumen print than to anything the eye would see in the dark, and the reference feels deliberate. The picture reaches back toward the moonlit romantic landscape, the whole tradition of the nocturne, while grounding it in a scrappy, ordinary patch of American woods at the edge of some town.

Held in pigment on aluminium, the tangle acquires a jewelled density; each branch is a hard dark line incised into the glow behind it. The photograph is less a window than a woven thing, an object one reads for its surface as much as its depth. What it offers is the old, uneasy pleasure of the sublime seen from cover—nature at its most theatrical, glimpsed through the undergrowth by someone reluctant, or unable, to step out into the clearing.