Rain has been on the glass, and the world beyond it has surrendered its edges. A wet road runs out toward a low horizon; dark evergreens crowd both shoulders, leaning as if the wind had a preference; the sky is the grey-green of water in a zinc bucket. Nothing is sharp. Todd Hido made many of these pictures from a moving car, through a windshield he did not wipe, and Roaming is the name he gave to that method of drifting.
I think of the road as a sentence with no period, a going that never arrives. The trees are the only company, and they are the kind of trees that grow where no one plants them, at the ragged margins of somewhere. What the blur does is generous: it removes the specific and leaves the mood, the way a half-heard piece of music can feel more true than the recording ever managed.
There is melancholy here, but also a strange tenderness for the overlooked stretch of nowhere between towns. The archival pigment print holds the low light without hardening it. I have driven roads like this in weather like this, watching the wipers lose their argument with the rain, and the photograph returns that feeling to me intact: the private hush of being enclosed and moving while the country outside dissolves.
Rain has been on the glass, and the world beyond it has surrendered its edges. A wet road runs out toward a low horizon; dark evergreens crowd both shoulders, leaning as if the wind had a preference; the sky is the grey-green of water in a zinc bucket. Nothing is sharp. Todd Hido made many of these pictures from a moving car, through a windshield he did not wipe, and Roaming is the name he gave to that method of drifting.
I think of the road as a sentence with no period, a going that never arrives. The trees are the only company, and they are the kind of trees that grow where no one plants them, at the ragged margins of somewhere. What the blur does is generous: it removes the specific and leaves the mood, the way a half-heard piece of music can feel more true than the recording ever managed.
There is melancholy here, but also a strange tenderness for the overlooked stretch of nowhere between towns. The archival pigment print holds the low light without hardening it. I have driven roads like this in weather like this, watching the wipers lose their argument with the rain, and the photograph returns that feeling to me intact: the private hush of being enclosed and moving while the country outside dissolves.