What did the sign once say? The letters have come loose from their meaning, a rusted armature of channel-letters seen from an angle that scrambles them into near-alphabet, held aloft on two thin masts against a bleached sky. Birds have colonised the top rail. This is the roadside vernacular in its afterlife, the commercial signage that outlives the business it advertised and becomes, simply, an object weathering in the weather.
Hido has always been a collector of such things, the way an earlier century's photographers collected shopfronts and gravestones and the painted names on brick. The picture belongs to a long history of documenting the obsolete, of pointing a camera at what is on its way to rust and letting the corrosion stand in for time itself. A faint contrail overhead and the drooping power lines at the corner fix the thing in an American nowhere.
Consider the print as a material fact of its own. Archival pigment on aluminium: a modern, industrial substrate carrying the image of an older, failing industry of signs. The warm faded colour is not nostalgia applied from outside but a property of the surface, a patina the object and the print seem to share. One decaying artifact photographs another, and both are held, for now, against their disappearance.
What did the sign once say? The letters have come loose from their meaning, a rusted armature of channel-letters seen from an angle that scrambles them into near-alphabet, held aloft on two thin masts against a bleached sky. Birds have colonised the top rail. This is the roadside vernacular in its afterlife, the commercial signage that outlives the business it advertised and becomes, simply, an object weathering in the weather.
Hido has always been a collector of such things, the way an earlier century's photographers collected shopfronts and gravestones and the painted names on brick. The picture belongs to a long history of documenting the obsolete, of pointing a camera at what is on its way to rust and letting the corrosion stand in for time itself. A faint contrail overhead and the drooping power lines at the corner fix the thing in an American nowhere.
Consider the print as a material fact of its own. Archival pigment on aluminium: a modern, industrial substrate carrying the image of an older, failing industry of signs. The warm faded colour is not nostalgia applied from outside but a property of the surface, a patina the object and the print seem to share. One decaying artifact photographs another, and both are held, for now, against their disappearance.