Todd Hido

Thin scorched trees stand in ragged ranks across a pale field, tufts of bleached grass scattered between them, while a low sun burns through a smoke-hazed sky and throws bright orbs of lens flare down the length of the frame. The land looks recently burned, or simply exhausted, its color drained toward sepia and ash. The scene is undeniably beautiful, and that beauty is precisely the problem the picture sets.

Catastrophe has a way of photographing well, and the camera has never been able to help itself; it aestheticizes whatever it touches, turning ruin into composition and disaster into luminous light. Here the sublimity of the haze and the swollen sun very nearly persuades you to forget what a field of dead trees actually means. To feel the strong pull of the image and to distrust it in the same instant is the only honest response left to a viewer.

Part of End Sends Advance Warning, whose title now reads like a plain ecological omen, the picture comes as an archival pigment print on Dibond, the smoky light held luminous across its wide surface. Hido has moved outward from the melancholy of the suburb to something larger and colder — a landscape photographed after some unnamed event. The photograph mourns and dazzles in a single breath, and asks you, above all, to notice that it does both at once.