Todd Hido

Streaks of snow slash across the entire frame, driven nearly horizontal, and through that violent lattice a fishing boat lists at the left, its hull lettered BERING SEA, its rigging strung with faint lights. The water below churns pale and cold. It is a picture of a vessel in genuine trouble, or at least in genuine weather, and the storm is not a backdrop but very nearly the subject.

This belongs to End Sends Advance Warning, among the most apocalyptic of Hido's series, its very title carrying a note of foreboding. The image departs from the quiet suburban houses that made his name and reaches instead for the elemental and the imperiled, a working boat named for one of the harshest seas on earth, battling the same weather that elsewhere in his work merely veils a lawn. The shift feels earned, and of its anxious moment.

I think of the long history of the storm at sea in art, from the marine painters through Turner, the human enterprise dwarfed by nature's indifference. Hido gives that ancient theme a contemporary chill. Rendered as an archival pigment print on Dibond, the blizzard's white streaks keep their ferocity at scale, and the little boat, still lit, still afloat, stands for every fragile thing that keeps going into weather that would prefer it did not.