Todd Hido

Wet asphalt runs straight up the center of the frame and loses itself in a white fog, snow banked along both shoulders, bare trees leaning in from either side with the blurred urgency of things glimpsed from a moving car. The edges melt and run; only the dark ribbon of road stays firm, a wet seam down the middle of a world going soft and pale. It is winter at its most undressed and its most inward.

There is a real intimacy in this kind of looking — the solitary drive, the windshield standing in for a lens, the private hour when the whole landscape belongs to one pair of eyes and no one else's. Hido's roads always feel like approaches to something, a house, a person, a memory waiting at the far end, though the destination never quite arrives. The picture keeps you in the passage, in the tender in-between, where longing has somewhere to travel and nowhere yet to land.

Left unpublished within its series yet wholly of a piece with his winters, the image comes as an archival pigment print on Dibond, the fog rendered as a luminous, almost tactile grey you could press a palm against. No body appears anywhere in it, and yet the whole thing is bodily: the pull forward, the cold gathering at the glass, the ache of driving on toward something you want and cannot yet see.