Two strands of pearls lie against her throat, and it is there, at the pearls, that the image catches and holds me. Everything else assembles into a type, the dark bob, the powder-blue eyeshadow of another era, the red mouth, the pale shirt fallen open, a woman styled into a period and foreshortened as she lies back and gazes up past the lens. The styling is the general text, the coded citation of a 1960s glamour we all recognize without having lived it.
But the pearls, doubled and slightly too perfect, are the small wound. They insist on a real neck, a real pulse beneath the costume, and they turn the mannequin back into a person for as long as I look at them. Soft-focus, made with a cheap camera in the square format Hido favors for this series, the picture hovers between portrait and tableau, between someone found and someone directed.
Excerpts from Silver Meadows folds such figures among its houses and fields, as if the woman were another kind of dwelling, another interior to be entered carefully. The archival pigment print on aluminium keeps the blur intact, the eyes catching two tiny highlights that will not let me settle. I cannot say whether I am moved by her or by the pearls she wears; the photograph refuses to separate them, and that refusal is its melancholy.
Two strands of pearls lie against her throat, and it is there, at the pearls, that the image catches and holds me. Everything else assembles into a type, the dark bob, the powder-blue eyeshadow of another era, the red mouth, the pale shirt fallen open, a woman styled into a period and foreshortened as she lies back and gazes up past the lens. The styling is the general text, the coded citation of a 1960s glamour we all recognize without having lived it.
But the pearls, doubled and slightly too perfect, are the small wound. They insist on a real neck, a real pulse beneath the costume, and they turn the mannequin back into a person for as long as I look at them. Soft-focus, made with a cheap camera in the square format Hido favors for this series, the picture hovers between portrait and tableau, between someone found and someone directed.
Excerpts from Silver Meadows folds such figures among its houses and fields, as if the woman were another kind of dwelling, another interior to be entered carefully. The archival pigment print on aluminium keeps the blur intact, the eyes catching two tiny highlights that will not let me settle. I cannot say whether I am moved by her or by the pearls she wears; the photograph refuses to separate them, and that refusal is its melancholy.