Somebody once painted this house a cheerful yellow and then time went to work on it, lifting the paint in scabs and blotches until the siding looks less like a wall than a map of somewhere unpleasant. Two small windows sit side by side, their glass furred with frost or condensation, and in that frozen film you can just make out the ghost of a treeline, reflected or seeped through, it is hard to say which.
This is the detail I cannot leave alone: the reflection trapped in the ice on the pane. It is the sort of thing you would never notice standing in the yard, cold and wanting to be elsewhere, and yet the camera treats it as the main event. Hido shoots these in square format, close in, so the house fills the frame and denies you any comforting context, any sky to escape into.
Excerpts from Silver Meadows is his most autobiographical project, circling the Ohio of his childhood, and there is something to the idea that a neglected house can stand in for memory itself: patchy, peeling, half-legible, with a frozen window you can nearly but not quite see into. Printed big as an archival pigment on Dibond, the ruined yellow becomes almost beautiful, which is either the consolation or the trap.
Somebody once painted this house a cheerful yellow and then time went to work on it, lifting the paint in scabs and blotches until the siding looks less like a wall than a map of somewhere unpleasant. Two small windows sit side by side, their glass furred with frost or condensation, and in that frozen film you can just make out the ghost of a treeline, reflected or seeped through, it is hard to say which.
This is the detail I cannot leave alone: the reflection trapped in the ice on the pane. It is the sort of thing you would never notice standing in the yard, cold and wanting to be elsewhere, and yet the camera treats it as the main event. Hido shoots these in square format, close in, so the house fills the frame and denies you any comforting context, any sky to escape into.
Excerpts from Silver Meadows is his most autobiographical project, circling the Ohio of his childhood, and there is something to the idea that a neglected house can stand in for memory itself: patchy, peeling, half-legible, with a frozen window you can nearly but not quite see into. Printed big as an archival pigment on Dibond, the ruined yellow becomes almost beautiful, which is either the consolation or the trap.