Photography went to the mountains almost as soon as it could travel. The survey expeditions of the 1860s hauled their glass plates toward serrated horizons much like this one, and the prints they brought back were toned in browns and golds close to the bronze weather filling this frame. Todd Hido arrives at that old genre from the opposite direction. He is a photographer of suburban windows and wet windshields, and he treats these peaks the way he treats a house at night: as dark shapes that withhold more than they give.
Two mountains stand in silhouette, their crests notched like a broken saw, and between them the sky opens into a saddle of paler cloud. Below, the water lies flat as pewter, the one reliably bright thing in the picture; the foreground plain has gone almost entirely to black. The sun never quite appears, only a smear of brightness at the upper right where the cloud thins. It is the structure of a nineteenth-century landscape carrying the tonality of a drive at dusk, and it offers no scale: no road, no figure, no fence. Distance here is something you feel in the stomach rather than measure.
Hido, born in Kent, Ohio in 1968 and long based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is best known for luminous houses photographed at night, and his prints are held by SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney. This archival pigment print extends those nocturnes into open country, its inks holding the slow slide from black ridge to veiled sun without ever breaking it.
Photography went to the mountains almost as soon as it could travel. The survey expeditions of the 1860s hauled their glass plates toward serrated horizons much like this one, and the prints they brought back were toned in browns and golds close to the bronze weather filling this frame. Todd Hido arrives at that old genre from the opposite direction. He is a photographer of suburban windows and wet windshields, and he treats these peaks the way he treats a house at night: as dark shapes that withhold more than they give.
Two mountains stand in silhouette, their crests notched like a broken saw, and between them the sky opens into a saddle of paler cloud. Below, the water lies flat as pewter, the one reliably bright thing in the picture; the foreground plain has gone almost entirely to black. The sun never quite appears, only a smear of brightness at the upper right where the cloud thins. It is the structure of a nineteenth-century landscape carrying the tonality of a drive at dusk, and it offers no scale: no road, no figure, no fence. Distance here is something you feel in the stomach rather than measure.
Hido, born in Kent, Ohio in 1968 and long based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is best known for luminous houses photographed at night, and his prints are held by SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney. This archival pigment print extends those nocturnes into open country, its inks holding the slow slide from black ridge to veiled sun without ever breaking it.