Artificial light filters through curtains, a silhouette emerges from an empty corridor, isolated houses appear in the mist. With Todd Hido, images don't document: they suggest. They speak of blurred memories, suspended emotions and familiar solitude.
An American photographer born in Ohio in 1968, Hido has been building an intimate, cinematic body of work for over two decades. Trained in Boston and then San Francisco, he soon developed a vision influenced by the aesthetics of Hopper, the ambiguity of Lynch and the shadows of Hitchcock. Yet his style is unlike any other.
With the House Hunting series, which made his name in the early 2000s, he travels the American suburbs after dark. There, he photographed anonymous housing estates, their windows lit, like frozen backdrops. The human element is often absent, but always latent, glimpsed in a flash of light or a crumpled sheet. Captured with long exposures and a heightened sensitivity to light, the photographs exude a silent tension. Everyday life becomes fiction.
Todd Hido gradually added a more carnal dimension to this exploration of suburban territory. In Between the Two and Excerpts from Silver Meadows, he incorporates female figures, often nude or partially revealed, photographed in bedrooms, cars and domestic spaces. Far from an aesthetic of provocation, these are traces: enigmatic presences, fragments of desire, reconstructed memories. His visual universe is based on an economy of means: a blur, a sepia tint, mist on a window pane. And yet, each shot seems to contain an entire novel. Todd Hido speaks of what we don't say. He photographs absence, melancholy, childhood memories, impulses and memory.
Today, his work is exhibited in major museums from the USA to Europe. But it is perhaps through his books - Roaming, Bright Black World and the sumptuous Intimate Distance - that his work reveals itself most profoundly, where photography becomes mental landscape.
