A child's tricycle, red, lies on its side in the dry grass at the foot of a long beige wall, and the whole picture tips down to meet it. Hido has set the camera low, almost on the ground, so the cinder-block courses run away in steep perspective and the little machine becomes the sole event in a great deal of nothing. Somewhere above, a tree throws its reflection into the top corner.
There is a temptation, I feel it, then resist it, to narrate the thing: the abandoned toy, the vanished child, the usual freight of suburban dread that clings to Hido's world like damp. But the tricycle hasn't been abandoned so much as left, the way children leave things, mid-thought, expecting to return. That distinction matters. Dread is cheap; the truer note is the ordinary carelessness of a life still going on just out of frame.
Made for Excerpts from Silver Meadows and its Nymph Daughters strand, printed as archival pigment on aluminium, the image trades Hido's usual dusk for a flat, washed daylight that flattens the drama further. What's left is a wall, some weeds, a fallen toy, and the odd conviction, which the picture earns without arguing for it, that this is what most of childhood actually looks like from the ground up.
A child's tricycle, red, lies on its side in the dry grass at the foot of a long beige wall, and the whole picture tips down to meet it. Hido has set the camera low, almost on the ground, so the cinder-block courses run away in steep perspective and the little machine becomes the sole event in a great deal of nothing. Somewhere above, a tree throws its reflection into the top corner.
There is a temptation, I feel it, then resist it, to narrate the thing: the abandoned toy, the vanished child, the usual freight of suburban dread that clings to Hido's world like damp. But the tricycle hasn't been abandoned so much as left, the way children leave things, mid-thought, expecting to return. That distinction matters. Dread is cheap; the truer note is the ordinary carelessness of a life still going on just out of frame.
Made for Excerpts from Silver Meadows and its Nymph Daughters strand, printed as archival pigment on aluminium, the image trades Hido's usual dusk for a flat, washed daylight that flattens the drama further. What's left is a wall, some weeds, a fallen toy, and the odd conviction, which the picture earns without arguing for it, that this is what most of childhood actually looks like from the ground up.