Todd Hido

Along the lower edge the film's own sprocket holes have printed through, a red-lit row of perforations Hido chose not to crop. The general scene is easily told: a winter road seen through a car's windshield, a billboard on its pole, bare trees, dirty snow, the dashboard's dark curve. This is the information any caption could supply. Roaming, the series is called, and roaming is what the eye does here.

But it is the streaked, scratched glass that reaches me, that small violence set between me and the world. The wiper has cleared an arc and left everything else smeared, so the trees dissolve and the sky curdles. I am placed exactly where the driver sat; the windshield becomes a second negative, scratched like the film itself, and I cannot decide whether I am looking out or being shown my own looking.

The archival pigment print on Dibond lends this dishevelment a strange permanence. What wounds me is not the desolate American roadside — I have passed a thousand of them — but the intimacy of the smear, the evidence that someone was here, cold, going somewhere, and stopped long enough to make the going into an image. The detail insists: this happened, on this road, in a light that is already gone.