Todd Hido: House Hunting
The images are extremely sharp–Hido makes them himself from negatives taken with a medium-format Pentax–and the colors are almost hyperreal, lush and seductive. In Untitled (2844) (the titles come from the sequential numbers Hido assigns his negatives, not all of which he prints), the tail of a blue car peeks around the corner of a one-story cinder block home, contrasting with the warm light in the windows and a glowing tannish sky; one can almost feel the granularity of the snow. But there’s an edge to this beauty: tracks lead to one of the two illuminated windows from exactly where the photographer stands, as if he’d actually tried to see in. And the photograph itself suggests a voyeur of sorts. (Hido never trespasses, always shooting on public property, a street or sidewalk, but still he’s annoyed some homes’ occupants, who’ve turned out their lights or called police.)
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Not every photograph here was taken outdoors; two of empty rooms suggest homes that have been recently vacated, also evoking the transience of working-class lives. Untitled (1928-A) shows a room devoid of furniture, though its surfaces–scratched fake wood walls and a rococo linoleum floor–form a symphony of lush browns. In Untitled (1932) a lone table holds an ornate kitschy lamp in a cream-colored room. The lamp is plugged in, but the other wall and phone sockets are empty, and the lamp shade is stained and askew. Such small touches suggest the human past of a scene of abandonment and dislocation.
