There is almost nothing to hold onto: a snow-covered field, rows of broken cornstalks stitching the white, a dark ribbon of bare trees along the horizon, and a sky so pale it barely registers as sky. Blowing snow softens the far edge into vapour. The picture withholds incident on principle, and the withholding is the point.
Within Excerpts from Silver Meadows, landscapes like this serve as connective tissue, the establishing shots of a fiction Hido assembles from his own photographs and found images. They are staged less through what is placed before the camera than through what is left out: no figure, no structure, no anecdote, only the depopulated Midwest as a kind of psychological weather. The constructedness lies in the sequencing, in how such emptiness gets loaded once it sits among portraits and interiors.
As an archival pigment print on aluminium, the field's near-monochrome is exact and unsentimental, the stubble rendered with a clarity that resists the fog trying to swallow it. This is contemporary landscape as mood-board and memory-set at once, a surface deliberately kept open. The image asks to be completed by everything around it, which is precisely how Hido wants his pictures to work: legible, fully, only in company.
There is almost nothing to hold onto: a snow-covered field, rows of broken cornstalks stitching the white, a dark ribbon of bare trees along the horizon, and a sky so pale it barely registers as sky. Blowing snow softens the far edge into vapour. The picture withholds incident on principle, and the withholding is the point.
Within Excerpts from Silver Meadows, landscapes like this serve as connective tissue, the establishing shots of a fiction Hido assembles from his own photographs and found images. They are staged less through what is placed before the camera than through what is left out: no figure, no structure, no anecdote, only the depopulated Midwest as a kind of psychological weather. The constructedness lies in the sequencing, in how such emptiness gets loaded once it sits among portraits and interiors.
As an archival pigment print on aluminium, the field's near-monochrome is exact and unsentimental, the stubble rendered with a clarity that resists the fog trying to swallow it. This is contemporary landscape as mood-board and memory-set at once, a surface deliberately kept open. The image asks to be completed by everything around it, which is precisely how Hido wants his pictures to work: legible, fully, only in company.