Todd Hido

A body turned upside down forfeits its dignity and gains something stranger: it becomes a fact of gravity, two pale legs hooked over a limb the way a coat is hung on a peg. Hido gives us only the lower half, the rest withheld above the frame, so that identity drains from the picture and what remains is pure exposure, skin against bark, muscle against the indifference of wood.

The branch is the true subject, scarred with initials someone once cut into it, freckled with lenticels and a dark knot that reads, uncomfortably, as a small closed mouth. Around it the summer canopy dissolves into a field of soft luminous discs, the out-of-focus light that photography turns into a kind of weather. There is play here, the old game of hanging from a tree, and there is also its shadow: every childhood pleasure rehearses a later helplessness.

Looking makes us complicit, in the child's exposure and in our own nostalgia, which is never innocent. The archival pigment print, mounted on aluminium, fixes this ambiguity for good, a still gymnastic that will never right itself. What the image mourns is not this one afternoon but the general condition it stands for: that we are, all of us, briefly suspended, and that the ground is always waiting below.