Todd Hido

The blue is almost the whole subject. Hido pitches the entire frame into a deep, saturated teal, so dark that the eye must work to separate a heavy overcast sky from the wet ground beneath it. A black diagonal, a road or a breakwater, drives in from the lower left; water lies in sheets across the flat land; on the far horizon a scatter of low buildings shows a few small lights, the only warm points in a cold field.

Colour, in this picture, is doing what tone once did for an earlier photography. Where a nineteenth-century plate might have used silver to render the sublime, Hido uses a digital blue to carry the same freight of dread and vastness, pushing the medium toward the condition of painting without losing the specific fact of a real, sodden place. The near-abstraction is calculated; representation and mood are held in a single, deliberate key.

From Bright Black World and printed as an archival pigment on Dibond, the work belongs to Hido's project of photographing a planet that looks increasingly unfamiliar to itself. The distant lights are the human presence, small and imperilled against the weather. What the picture withholds, detail, comfort, a clear line between land and sky, is exactly what makes its blue so total, and so hard to look away from.