Todd Hido

Red is the whole event. A two-storey suburban house, the kind found by the thousand, has been flooded with an intense red light that turns its clapboards, its garage doors, its screened porch and the cracked concrete of the drive all one hot, artificial hue. The trees around it stay nearly black. Whatever the colour is doing, it does to the entire picture at once.

The house itself is described with the photographer's usual patience: two windows above, two below, a modest gabled roof, an attached double garage, dead leaves gathered on the drive and lawn — an ordinary autumn night at an ordinary address. The composition is frontal and stable, the driveway leading the eye straight to the dark screen door at the centre, a black opening in all that red.

What the red supplies is not information but pressure. Realistic light would make this a record of a house; the saturated wash makes it a mood, a sense of alarm laid over the commonplace. Hido, working here outside any named series, trusts a single chromatic decision to carry the image. As an archival pigment print mounted on aluminium, the red stays even and unbroken across the sheet — a plain house made strange by nothing more than the colour of its light.