Todd Hido

How many trees does it take to make a scene feel haunted? Two, apparently — two bare deciduous trees standing in a tawny, snow-patched field while fog eats everything behind them, reducing the far treeline and a lone house on the right to the faintest gray suggestions. Power lines swing across the top corner; a dark conifer leans in from the left edge, as if it had wandered into the frame by accident.

The trees are not identical, which is what makes them a pair rather than a pattern: the left one is thin, half-dead, missing limbs, while the central one spreads a fuller crown, still keeping up appearances. I find myself assigning them temperaments, which is exactly the trap Hido lays — the emptier the picture, the more we furnish it. This is late work, part of End Sends Advance Warning, and it has the hush of a place seen from a slowing car.

Wet asphalt and thin snow gather at the lower right, betraying the roadside vantage without making a fuss about it. Printed as archival pigment on Dibond, the muted olive and gray-green fog is held with real tact, nothing sharpened, nothing forced. It is a picture that says almost nothing and lingers anyway, like a landscape half-remembered from a drive whose purpose you have forgotten.