Todd Hido

A low amber glow rests on the horizon, where a hidden light, the last of the sun or the moon behind cloud, catches the underside of a heavy, moving sky and turns it the colour of an old photograph. Before it stands a dense tangle of bare trees and winter brush, their twigs printed dark against a strip of pale water glimpsed between the trunks. The whole scene is warm and dim, more remembered than observed, held in tones of rust and umber.

Hido made this picture and set it aside, unpublished, and there is something fitting in that privacy, for it feels like a page from a personal notebook rather than a public statement. It carries forward his long fascination with American edgelands, the scrubby, in-between ground along a river or behind a road, the kind of place a child explores and an adult forgets. Here that ground is dense, nearly impassable, and quietly beautiful.

Printed as archival pigment on aluminium, the darks stay rich without closing entirely, and the amber band at the horizon reads like a slow ember. One feels the tradition of the nocturne behind it, of painters and photographers who understood that landscape after dark becomes chiefly a matter of mood. Hido's mood is contemplative and faintly ominous, a thicket lit from behind by a warmth we cannot reach, and a distance the branches will not let us enter.