Todd Hido

Clouds drift across her, and across the wall behind her, because the sky in this picture is projected, a photograph of weather thrown as light onto the room and onto her bare shoulders. A young woman with dark hair and a red mouth looks directly out, warmly lit in amber where the projection catches her, cooler blue where her own shadow falls across the moving clouds behind.

The double exposure of image and body is the whole idea, and it is lovely and a little uncanny. She wears the sky the way one wears a mood; the clouds pass over her face and she does not flinch, as though weather were something that happened inside a person as readily as above a field. Hido, whose landscapes so often carry human feeling, here simply reverses the traffic and lets the landscape play across a human face.

This unpublished image, an archival pigment print on aluminium, joins his portraiture to his skies in a single frame, and the seam barely shows. What stays with me is her steadiness under all that motion, the calm, direct look held while the heavens slide across her skin. It is a picture about being inhabited by light, and about the strange composure of a face that has agreed to become a screen.