Todd Hido

There's a smear in the bottom corner — a soft halo of bokeh where the lens caught something on the glass, a bead of condensation or a fleck of road grime — and once you've seen it you can't unsee that this whole picture was taken through a windscreen, probably without stopping the car. That's the thing about driving in fog: you keep meaning to pull over and you never quite do, and the best views are the ones that arrive while you're still moving. So the bare trees on the right rear up out of the murk like they've stepped into the road, and the small sun, swaddled in cloud and snagged behind a tangle of branches top left, glows the dull silver of a coin you've left in your pocket through the wash.

What gets me is the hedgerow along the bottom, that low dark band keeping its own counsel, and the thin saplings standing out in the field like people who arrived too early for something. Nobody's there. There's a slice of pale road bottom right, going off to wherever, and you understand the photographer is on it, has been on it for hours, somewhere in the wet European dark before morning properly commits.

Hido has spent a career making the ordinary lit window and the empty highway feel like the inside of a half-remembered dream, and this belongs to the colder, more oceanic register of that work — the foggy, dusk-blue mood he turned into whole books. The print is offered in sizes up to nearly five feet wide, mounted on Dibond, and at that scale the fog stops being weather and becomes the actual subject: a grey that holds light without ever resolving into anything you could name. Which is, I think, the point. You don't drive home from a picture like this. You keep going.