The true subject of this picture is the weather, and the weather arrives the modern way: as rain beaded on the glass between the camera and a clutch of bare trees. Each droplet hangs in the grey light like a small flaw in the old claim that photographs deliver the world itself. They deliver a vantage. This one confesses as much, and the confession is its honesty.
Everything in the scene colludes in melancholy: the dun hill, the leafless crowns, the dark road sliding off to the right, a sky mottled like wet newsprint. Photography has always had an appetite for the forlorn; sadness photographs well, which should make us wary. What rescues the image from picturesqueness is the wet window itself, the fact of looking from inside a car at a country one is passing through and will not enter. That is how most of us now see landscape, briefly and behind glass, and the picture makes the condition visible instead of pretending to an intimacy it does not have.
Todd Hido has made this compromised view his signature: an Ohio-born photographer, long based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who drives, watches and photographs America’s in-between places, numbering his pictures rather than titling them. His work is held by SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney. As an archival pigment print, this image keeps its softness intact, the browns and greys settling into paper without hardening, so that the rain on the glass stays what it was: the atmosphere through which one saw, for a moment, a hill and some trees.
The true subject of this picture is the weather, and the weather arrives the modern way: as rain beaded on the glass between the camera and a clutch of bare trees. Each droplet hangs in the grey light like a small flaw in the old claim that photographs deliver the world itself. They deliver a vantage. This one confesses as much, and the confession is its honesty.
Everything in the scene colludes in melancholy: the dun hill, the leafless crowns, the dark road sliding off to the right, a sky mottled like wet newsprint. Photography has always had an appetite for the forlorn; sadness photographs well, which should make us wary. What rescues the image from picturesqueness is the wet window itself, the fact of looking from inside a car at a country one is passing through and will not enter. That is how most of us now see landscape, briefly and behind glass, and the picture makes the condition visible instead of pretending to an intimacy it does not have.
Todd Hido has made this compromised view his signature: an Ohio-born photographer, long based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who drives, watches and photographs America’s in-between places, numbering his pictures rather than titling them. His work is held by SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney. As an archival pigment print, this image keeps its softness intact, the browns and greys settling into paper without hardening, so that the rain on the glass stays what it was: the atmosphere through which one saw, for a moment, a hill and some trees.