Todd Hido

If you wanted to photograph the end of the world on a budget, you might start here: a wet, potholed road running out into fog, a black tarp lashed along a chain-link fence, telephone poles trailing their cats-cradle of wires into the murk, and one sodium streetlamp glowing a lonely orange overhead. A street sign is just legible. It is the kind of place you drive through without ever meaning to arrive.

Hido has always been drawn to the parts of America the postcards skip, but this, from End Sends Advance Warning, is bleaker than the old night houses, drained of even their warm lit windows. The single working streetlamp does the sad comedy of the whole scene, insisting on illuminating a stretch of nowhere that no one is looking at, except him, except now us.

There is a temptation to reach for the word dystopian, which I will resist, partly because the place is patently real and someone probably commutes along it daily without a shred of dread. That is the quiet joke and the quiet horror of it: this is not a set. Printed large as an archival pigment on Dibond, the darkness gains a wet, tactile depth, and the fog does what fog always does in his work, turning an ordinary industrial edge into the threshold of something you would rather not name.