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Todd Hido

American, b. 1968
8604-a, 2009
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
50.8 x 50.8 cm / 20 x 20 in
76.2 x 76.2 cm / 30 x 30 in
121.9 x 121.9 cm / 48 x 48 in
Signed, titled, numbered, and dated on a label affixed to the verso of the mount
Edition of 10 + 3 AP — 50.8 x 50.8 cm / 20 x 20 in
Edition of 5 + 1 AP — 76.2 x 76.2 cm / 30 x 30 in
Edition of 3 + 1 AP — 121.9 x 121.9 cm / 48 x 48 in
© The Artist

The sun burns a hole in the middle of the picture, a ragged white flare that bleaches the sky and throws long rays down across the snow. Beneath it a car sits half-buried, a trailer waits behind bare trees, and dead grass claws up through the drifts. The light is not warmth; it is glare, the cold radiance of a winter afternoon that gives no heat and permits no shadow to hide in.

Photographs of ruin are easy; photographs of mere dormancy are harder, and this is the second kind. Nothing has happened here except weather. Yet the faded, sepia-tinged palette and the vignetted edges lend the scene the quality of a recovered snapshot, an image that seems already to belong to the past. Melancholy in photography is often just this: the present tense arriving pre-aged, as if the moment knew it would be missed.

Rendered as an archival pigment print on Dibond and gathered into End Sends Advance Warning, the picture converts a nondescript rural yard into a meditation on endurance. The buried vehicles are not dramatic; they are patient, waiting out the season under a light too bright to comfort. To look is to feel the particular loneliness of a place where people clearly live and no one is to be seen.

8604-a