It is the scratches I cannot leave alone: a pale scribble low on the left panels, at the height of a dragged bureau or an impatient dog. Around them the room offers its official story, wood-grain walls, brown carpet, an office chair with chrome arms parked against the paneling, and the scratches quietly file their dissent. Something lived here, they say; something was hauled away.
The paneling is not wood, I think, but the photograph of wood, printed grain glued to a wall, and this doubles the picture’s melancholy: I am looking at an image of an image of a forest. The light enters from a window I am not shown and lays its warmth on the panels like late afternoon in a country the room has never visited. And the chair: turned slightly, as if someone had risen a moment ago, its casters ready, its errand over. An empty chair is always a portrait. This one, upholstered, brown, faintly official, is the portrait of whoever is never coming back to sit in it.
Todd Hido is known for prowling the suburb at night, but his interiors, found vacant like this one, are the reverse shots of those lit windows: this is what the glow looks like from inside, after the tenants have gone. The pictures live in SFMOMA, the Getty, the Whitney. In this archival pigment print the browns go down register by register, panel, carpet, shadow, until the corner itself seems upholstered. I would not sit. I would stand here a long time.
It is the scratches I cannot leave alone: a pale scribble low on the left panels, at the height of a dragged bureau or an impatient dog. Around them the room offers its official story, wood-grain walls, brown carpet, an office chair with chrome arms parked against the paneling, and the scratches quietly file their dissent. Something lived here, they say; something was hauled away.
The paneling is not wood, I think, but the photograph of wood, printed grain glued to a wall, and this doubles the picture’s melancholy: I am looking at an image of an image of a forest. The light enters from a window I am not shown and lays its warmth on the panels like late afternoon in a country the room has never visited. And the chair: turned slightly, as if someone had risen a moment ago, its casters ready, its errand over. An empty chair is always a portrait. This one, upholstered, brown, faintly official, is the portrait of whoever is never coming back to sit in it.
Todd Hido is known for prowling the suburb at night, but his interiors, found vacant like this one, are the reverse shots of those lit windows: this is what the glow looks like from inside, after the tenants have gone. The pictures live in SFMOMA, the Getty, the Whitney. In this archival pigment print the browns go down register by register, panel, carpet, shadow, until the corner itself seems upholstered. I would not sit. I would stand here a long time.