A chemical, aquarium green floods the flank of a cinderblock apartment block, thrown by some off-screen light — the kind of green you only see at night, and only in Todd Hido's photographs. Half the wall glows green, the other half bleeds red, snow lies churned and footprinted on the ground, and a single upstairs window burns a domestic orange, as if one ordinary life were carrying on inside a horror film's color scheme.
It is, of course, the classic Hido house — the lit window, the nocturnal dread, the intuition that the American residential building is the true haunted house of our era. This one, from Intimate Distance, adds graffiti, a spindly bare tree, and those red-tinted tracks in the snow that the mind insists on reading as evidence, though evidence of nothing more sinister than someone walking home.
What I admire is how Hido resists the temptation to explain the light. He never shows the source; the green and red simply are, like weather, like mood. Printed on Dibond, the scene has the cold saturation of a screen grab from a film that was never made. You stand outside it, uninvited, doing what everyone does outside a lit house at night — wondering who is home, and whether they are all right.
A chemical, aquarium green floods the flank of a cinderblock apartment block, thrown by some off-screen light — the kind of green you only see at night, and only in Todd Hido's photographs. Half the wall glows green, the other half bleeds red, snow lies churned and footprinted on the ground, and a single upstairs window burns a domestic orange, as if one ordinary life were carrying on inside a horror film's color scheme.
It is, of course, the classic Hido house — the lit window, the nocturnal dread, the intuition that the American residential building is the true haunted house of our era. This one, from Intimate Distance, adds graffiti, a spindly bare tree, and those red-tinted tracks in the snow that the mind insists on reading as evidence, though evidence of nothing more sinister than someone walking home.
What I admire is how Hido resists the temptation to explain the light. He never shows the source; the green and red simply are, like weather, like mood. Printed on Dibond, the scene has the cold saturation of a screen grab from a film that was never made. You stand outside it, uninvited, doing what everyone does outside a lit house at night — wondering who is home, and whether they are all right.