The tire tracks come first, before the hills, before the weather. Two faint parallel grooves curve up out of the lower frame and swing to the left, and it is they, not the grand overcast sky, that wound me a little: someone has passed here, recently, and is already gone. The general scene is legible enough, a graded dirt road, bare plowed fields, a bald hill on the horizon under low cloud, but that soft evidence of a vehicle is what pricks.
This is Roaming, and the road is the whole argument: a black-and-white expanse that refuses incident, that offers only surface, distance, and the grey pressure of the sky. Hido photographs it as though driving and stopping were the same act, the windshield exchanged for a tripod. The tones are printed with a restrained melancholy on aluminium-mounted paper, the highland nearly featureless, the furrows drawn in fine dark lines like a diagram of tedium and space.
What does such a picture want? Not to describe a place, one could not find it, but to fix the sensation of being nowhere in particular, en route, unwitnessed. I look and I am the driver; I look again and I am the one left standing at the shoulder while the tracks continue without me. The photograph gives me both, and keeps, in its curving road, the melancholy that all departures share.
The tire tracks come first, before the hills, before the weather. Two faint parallel grooves curve up out of the lower frame and swing to the left, and it is they, not the grand overcast sky, that wound me a little: someone has passed here, recently, and is already gone. The general scene is legible enough, a graded dirt road, bare plowed fields, a bald hill on the horizon under low cloud, but that soft evidence of a vehicle is what pricks.
This is Roaming, and the road is the whole argument: a black-and-white expanse that refuses incident, that offers only surface, distance, and the grey pressure of the sky. Hido photographs it as though driving and stopping were the same act, the windshield exchanged for a tripod. The tones are printed with a restrained melancholy on aluminium-mounted paper, the highland nearly featureless, the furrows drawn in fine dark lines like a diagram of tedium and space.
What does such a picture want? Not to describe a place, one could not find it, but to fix the sensation of being nowhere in particular, en route, unwitnessed. I look and I am the driver; I look again and I am the one left standing at the shoulder while the tracks continue without me. The photograph gives me both, and keeps, in its curving road, the melancholy that all departures share.