The name of a place, made of light. A street sign reading OHIO DR floats in the upper third of this small square picture, its reflective face throwing the camera's own flash back so fiercely that the letters seem to burn from within, hovering against a bruise-coloured sky and a lattice of bare black branches.
Considered as an object, the sign is the most ordinary thing imaginable — pressed aluminium and retroreflective sheeting, mass-produced, bolted to a pole on some anonymous residential drive. Yet photographed from below at night with a cheap plastic camera, it is transfigured into something nearer a relic or a votive. Hido keeps a documentarian's respect for such civic hardware and a collector's eye for how undramatic it truly is.
The picture belongs to Excerpts from Silver Meadows, a body of work stitched from the material traces of an Ohio childhood — signs, roads, houses, found snapshots. Naming the very state restores an autobiographical weight to the thing. As an archival pigment print mounted on aluminium, the glowing square is fixed and made permanent, one more salvaged fragment in a project built, like memory itself, from the humble and the overlooked.
The name of a place, made of light. A street sign reading OHIO DR floats in the upper third of this small square picture, its reflective face throwing the camera's own flash back so fiercely that the letters seem to burn from within, hovering against a bruise-coloured sky and a lattice of bare black branches.
Considered as an object, the sign is the most ordinary thing imaginable — pressed aluminium and retroreflective sheeting, mass-produced, bolted to a pole on some anonymous residential drive. Yet photographed from below at night with a cheap plastic camera, it is transfigured into something nearer a relic or a votive. Hido keeps a documentarian's respect for such civic hardware and a collector's eye for how undramatic it truly is.
The picture belongs to Excerpts from Silver Meadows, a body of work stitched from the material traces of an Ohio childhood — signs, roads, houses, found snapshots. Naming the very state restores an autobiographical weight to the thing. As an archival pigment print mounted on aluminium, the glowing square is fixed and made permanent, one more salvaged fragment in a project built, like memory itself, from the humble and the overlooked.