A stairwell wall in some ordinary American house holds a fan of pennants — Kent State University, the Houston Oilers, the Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, Dallas Cowboys, Oakland Raiders — pinned by a boy who once measured his loyalties in felt. Todd Hido made this archival pigment print, mounted on Dibond, within Excerpts from Silver Meadows, the series in which he returned to the Ohio landscape of his own childhood. A carved newel post steadies the right edge, a household anchor beside all that youthful allegiance.
What moves me is how tenderly Hido treats a decor most photographers would find merely quaint. The colors have gone soft and biscuit-warm, as if the room were remembering itself. A flare of orange light spills in from the right, less a flaw than a benediction, the kind of accident that gives vernacular spaces their unrepeatable atmosphere.
Hido belongs to a lineage of American color photographers — Eggleston, Shore — who understood that a wall of team banners can carry the whole weight of a boyhood. He neither mocks these objects nor sentimentalizes them. He simply lets them stand, faded and specific, so that we feel the presence of the absent child, and the house that shaped him, without ever seeing his face.
A stairwell wall in some ordinary American house holds a fan of pennants — Kent State University, the Houston Oilers, the Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, Dallas Cowboys, Oakland Raiders — pinned by a boy who once measured his loyalties in felt. Todd Hido made this archival pigment print, mounted on Dibond, within Excerpts from Silver Meadows, the series in which he returned to the Ohio landscape of his own childhood. A carved newel post steadies the right edge, a household anchor beside all that youthful allegiance.
What moves me is how tenderly Hido treats a decor most photographers would find merely quaint. The colors have gone soft and biscuit-warm, as if the room were remembering itself. A flare of orange light spills in from the right, less a flaw than a benediction, the kind of accident that gives vernacular spaces their unrepeatable atmosphere.
Hido belongs to a lineage of American color photographers — Eggleston, Shore — who understood that a wall of team banners can carry the whole weight of a boyhood. He neither mocks these objects nor sentimentalizes them. He simply lets them stand, faded and specific, so that we feel the presence of the absent child, and the house that shaped him, without ever seeing his face.