Shot on medium-format film, the picture has the square proportion and slight softness Hido reserves for his interiors, and it uses them to press close to a body it will not show whole. A woman reclines on a bare white mattress, her lower half caught in torn black stockings, one foot reaching toward a red carpet; the head and face stay outside the frame. Beside the bed a clear glass ashtray sits on the floor, and a radiator edges in at the upper left.
The cropping is the argument. By withholding identity and offering only limbs, the photograph pushes the figure toward the condition of the film still or the anonymous document, the register of noir and of the crime-scene photograph Hido has openly drawn upon. The torn hosiery and stripped mattress supply a narrative charge the image never resolves, so we read forensically, assembling a story from fabric, stain and posture that the picture refuses to confirm.
Belonging to Excerpts from Silver Meadows and the Nymph Daughters strand, the work sits within a longer tradition of the staged tableau, where constructed scenes borrow the authority of the found. As an archival pigment print on Dibond, its surface is cool and continuous, at odds with the warm disorder it depicts. That friction, between immaculate object and disquieting content, is where the photograph does its thinking.
Shot on medium-format film, the picture has the square proportion and slight softness Hido reserves for his interiors, and it uses them to press close to a body it will not show whole. A woman reclines on a bare white mattress, her lower half caught in torn black stockings, one foot reaching toward a red carpet; the head and face stay outside the frame. Beside the bed a clear glass ashtray sits on the floor, and a radiator edges in at the upper left.
The cropping is the argument. By withholding identity and offering only limbs, the photograph pushes the figure toward the condition of the film still or the anonymous document, the register of noir and of the crime-scene photograph Hido has openly drawn upon. The torn hosiery and stripped mattress supply a narrative charge the image never resolves, so we read forensically, assembling a story from fabric, stain and posture that the picture refuses to confirm.
Belonging to Excerpts from Silver Meadows and the Nymph Daughters strand, the work sits within a longer tradition of the staged tableau, where constructed scenes borrow the authority of the found. As an archival pigment print on Dibond, its surface is cool and continuous, at odds with the warm disorder it depicts. That friction, between immaculate object and disquieting content, is where the photograph does its thinking.