Todd Hido

Two tire tracks run up the centre of a snow-covered road and give out at a wall of fog. That small human mark, twin lines pressed into slush, is the picture's only certain evidence that someone came this way. To either side lie snowed-over fields; dead and broken trees crowd the left; telephone poles march off to the right and thin into nothing where the white sky comes down to meet the white ground.

The scene has the look of a place recorded because it might not last, the impulse behind so much vernacular photography, the roadside stop, the note-to-self made with a camera. Hido's fog performs an erasure in real time, taking the far trees first, then the poles, then the road itself, until the image seems to be documenting its own disappearance. What remains is the trace: the tracks, the leaning trunks, the receding line of poles.

As an archival pigment print on Dibond, from the series End Sends Advance Warning, the photograph is a durable object holding an image of pure transience. The tension between the two, permanent surface and vanishing subject, is where its melancholy lives. A road is meant to lead somewhere; this one leads into weather, and the tracks that prove a passage also mark its end.