Todd Hido

Frost has done the work of a printmaker here, furring every surface with a fine white crystalline growth: the clapboard wall, the sill of a blind window, the metal of a downspout, all encrusted alike. Hido's flash rakes across it at night, so that the ice reads as texture, granular and specific, the way a photograph loves to render the skin of things.

In front of the building a great drift of snow rises like a dune, its surface wind-rippled and pocked with clods and footprints of whatever passed. This is winter as a material event, an accumulation you could measure, and the picture is finally about accumulation itself, snow gathering on a wall, frost gathering on a pane, the slow deposit of matter that photography is uniquely fitted to describe.

The image asks to be read as an object among objects. Archival pigment on aluminium: a hard, cold, reflective support that suits a subject already hard and cold, so that substrate and subject seem to rhyme. The deep blue of the night is the blue of flash-lit snow, unmediated, almost documentary. What holds the attention is not a scene or a story but a surface, the encrusted skin of a house in the far north, recorded grain for grain.