There is a kind of photograph that courts its own dissolution, letting light flood in until the scene nearly disappears. Hido's sunstruck path is one of these: a wet track running between bare winter trees toward a sun that has burned a hole in the middle of the frame, scattering ghostly discs of flare across the haze. The image half-erases itself in the very act of being made, description surrendering to sheer luminance.
We tend to distrust such beauty as too easy, and there is a moral question buried in the glare—whether to be seduced or to resist. But the seduction is complicated by damp, by mud, by the plain bareness of the branches and the muddy shine of the puddled track; the transcendence, if it is that, is rooted in a cold and ordinary wood, not lifted free of it but held, briefly, in the damp air above the mud.
Photography's oldest promise was to fix the fleeting, and here the medium strains against that promise, chasing a radiance that will not hold still even on aluminium. What the picture finally withholds is any destination; the path leads only into light. It is an image about wanting to be overwhelmed, and about the sadness that follows the wish—the knowledge that the light in a photograph, however bright, is always already gone.
There is a kind of photograph that courts its own dissolution, letting light flood in until the scene nearly disappears. Hido's sunstruck path is one of these: a wet track running between bare winter trees toward a sun that has burned a hole in the middle of the frame, scattering ghostly discs of flare across the haze. The image half-erases itself in the very act of being made, description surrendering to sheer luminance.
We tend to distrust such beauty as too easy, and there is a moral question buried in the glare—whether to be seduced or to resist. But the seduction is complicated by damp, by mud, by the plain bareness of the branches and the muddy shine of the puddled track; the transcendence, if it is that, is rooted in a cold and ordinary wood, not lifted free of it but held, briefly, in the damp air above the mud.
Photography's oldest promise was to fix the fleeting, and here the medium strains against that promise, chasing a radiance that will not hold still even on aluminium. What the picture finally withholds is any destination; the path leads only into light. It is an image about wanting to be overwhelmed, and about the sadness that follows the wish—the knowledge that the light in a photograph, however bright, is always already gone.