You could drive past this field ten thousand times and never once think to stop, which is precisely why Todd Hido stopped. A plowed expanse of Ohio mud, furrows running to a low horizon of bare trees and telephone poles, puddles of meltwater catching what little light the overcast sky can spare. Nothing happens here. Nothing has happened for a while. That, somehow, is the subject.
The color is the giveaway — a deep, digestive brown, the brown of old wellingtons and cold gravy, warmed just enough that the whole thing glows like a landscape lit from inside a headache. It belongs to Excerpts from Silver Meadows, Hido's long meditation on the terrain of his own upbringing, and there is something almost comically bleak about a childhood remembered as a wet field in March.
And yet I keep looking, which is the trap these pictures set. The furrows pull the eye toward that thin tree line the way a sentence pulls you toward its full stop, promising an ending that turns out to be more of the same. Printed large on Dibond, the mud acquires a gravity it never had in life. Hido has taken the least photogenic acre in America and made you reluctant to leave it. The reluctance, you begin to suspect, is the entire point.
You could drive past this field ten thousand times and never once think to stop, which is precisely why Todd Hido stopped. A plowed expanse of Ohio mud, furrows running to a low horizon of bare trees and telephone poles, puddles of meltwater catching what little light the overcast sky can spare. Nothing happens here. Nothing has happened for a while. That, somehow, is the subject.
The color is the giveaway — a deep, digestive brown, the brown of old wellingtons and cold gravy, warmed just enough that the whole thing glows like a landscape lit from inside a headache. It belongs to Excerpts from Silver Meadows, Hido's long meditation on the terrain of his own upbringing, and there is something almost comically bleak about a childhood remembered as a wet field in March.
And yet I keep looking, which is the trap these pictures set. The furrows pull the eye toward that thin tree line the way a sentence pulls you toward its full stop, promising an ending that turns out to be more of the same. Printed large on Dibond, the mud acquires a gravity it never had in life. Hido has taken the least photogenic acre in America and made you reluctant to leave it. The reluctance, you begin to suspect, is the entire point.