There is something about a mobile home that was never going to be very mobile, and this one—turquoise-skirted, white-flanked, settled into a field of fresh snow—looks as though it hasn't moved in decades and doesn't intend to start now. Todd Hido came upon it in flat winter light, sky and ground the same pale nothing, so that the trailer floats in a colour I can only call weather. A white van idles far off to the left, the single other sign that anyone has ever passed this way.
You could file this under bleakness, and people do, but that undersells the oddly companionable quality of the thing. The teal shutters, the drawn curtain in the near window, the neat aluminium skin: someone cared about this home, chose that colour, hung those drapes. Printed large as archival pigment on Dibond, the surface holds the grain of the fog and the faint tracks in the snow, details that reward the kind of looking that has nowhere else to be.
What Hido does, and does quietly here, is refuse the easy irony. A lesser photographer would sneer at the trailer or sentimentalise it. This picture does neither. It simply stands in the cold beside the thing and keeps it company, and somewhere in that patient, undramatic attention the humble box acquires the gravity of a portrait. The van will drive on. The snow will keep falling. The home stays put, which is, after all, what homes are for.
There is something about a mobile home that was never going to be very mobile, and this one—turquoise-skirted, white-flanked, settled into a field of fresh snow—looks as though it hasn't moved in decades and doesn't intend to start now. Todd Hido came upon it in flat winter light, sky and ground the same pale nothing, so that the trailer floats in a colour I can only call weather. A white van idles far off to the left, the single other sign that anyone has ever passed this way.
You could file this under bleakness, and people do, but that undersells the oddly companionable quality of the thing. The teal shutters, the drawn curtain in the near window, the neat aluminium skin: someone cared about this home, chose that colour, hung those drapes. Printed large as archival pigment on Dibond, the surface holds the grain of the fog and the faint tracks in the snow, details that reward the kind of looking that has nowhere else to be.
What Hido does, and does quietly here, is refuse the easy irony. A lesser photographer would sneer at the trailer or sentimentalise it. This picture does neither. It simply stands in the cold beside the thing and keeps it company, and somewhere in that patient, undramatic attention the humble box acquires the gravity of a portrait. The van will drive on. The snow will keep falling. The home stays put, which is, after all, what homes are for.