The color is the first argument: a sepia that soaks everything, sky, fog, gravel, the dead grasses at the shoulder, until the whole scene seems steeped in tea or old varnish. Sepia is the color photography uses to mean the past. This picture was made recently, on a dirt road in the American winter, yet it arrives already antiqued, as if memory had gotten to it before we could.
One ought to distrust such beauty, and one succumbs anyway. The road, grooved by tires, runs toward a vanishing point the fog has simply erased; bare trees lean in from the left as if bending to watch; russet weeds hold the margins. It is an image of pure recession, and recession is photography’s oldest seduction: the promise that meaning waits a little farther on. No photograph has ever kept that promise. What the fog offers instead is wanting itself, distilled, the desire to continue down a road that ends, candidly, in nothing we are allowed to see.
Hido, an Ohioan long settled near San Francisco, has made the fogged road a signature as recognizable as his glowing night houses; SFMOMA, the Getty, and the Whitney all hold his prints. The seduction, in other words, is fully intended. As an archival pigment print, the picture fixes its jaundiced atmosphere with complete fidelity, every gradation of haze preserved. An image cannot take us anywhere; it can only detain us. This one detains us on a cold road, in beautiful weather for doubting, and we stand there gladly.
The color is the first argument: a sepia that soaks everything, sky, fog, gravel, the dead grasses at the shoulder, until the whole scene seems steeped in tea or old varnish. Sepia is the color photography uses to mean the past. This picture was made recently, on a dirt road in the American winter, yet it arrives already antiqued, as if memory had gotten to it before we could.
One ought to distrust such beauty, and one succumbs anyway. The road, grooved by tires, runs toward a vanishing point the fog has simply erased; bare trees lean in from the left as if bending to watch; russet weeds hold the margins. It is an image of pure recession, and recession is photography’s oldest seduction: the promise that meaning waits a little farther on. No photograph has ever kept that promise. What the fog offers instead is wanting itself, distilled, the desire to continue down a road that ends, candidly, in nothing we are allowed to see.
Hido, an Ohioan long settled near San Francisco, has made the fogged road a signature as recognizable as his glowing night houses; SFMOMA, the Getty, and the Whitney all hold his prints. The seduction, in other words, is fully intended. As an archival pigment print, the picture fixes its jaundiced atmosphere with complete fidelity, every gradation of haze preserved. An image cannot take us anywhere; it can only detain us. This one detains us on a cold road, in beautiful weather for doubting, and we stand there gladly.