dR

1/16/09 03:53 pm - AMERICAN SUBURB X - TODD HIDO - "TWO WAY STREET"

© Todd Hido

Click to go to the site...

http://www.americansuburbx.com

Todd Hido's new and unpublished work walks a fine line, a line that exists in the viewer rather than Todd. This work seems to come into existence through the eye's of a smeared-single-pane-window voyeur fog. It is the adult-white-male fog of childhood memories, the mental hot-iron-branding of broken families, divorced parents, alchohol, abuse... of 1970's vinyl feelings and plastic textures, popcorn ceilings and paneled-walls. It is a disturbing world that brings with it smells and sounds that are padlocked into the brain with a Freudish rush of emotion – the harsh emotion of the human psyche and the physical feelings of a traumatic sexual memory that has been locked forever into the consciousness... never to be set free. Phone-sex-operators, classified-ad-fetish-girls and white-trash-cotton-tube-top-prostitutes look back at you through flash-lit-black-circled-eye's, through the snapshot-amateur-porn-camera, through the page, through Todd's own head and into your face with harsh empty stares. It is not coldness that is felt but instead scarred naked vulnerability, little girl innocence long, long lost. A knowingness pours out to the viewer and an immediate understanding is passed between "them" and you. It is an understanding that their past contains ugliness, contains the scars of men walking across them like so many paved steps across a cracked ranch-style suburban driveway. These are not powerful females, they are victims of their sexual beauty and of life's brutal circumstance. The exterior scenes act as a view of the locations, the outside to their "inside", the setting for their willing and complicit participation, the dingy house and stained-sheet room for their dirty little "two way" acts.

In the context of this horribly mundane world of current contemporary photography, Todd's work stands apart from the pack by a wide gap. This gap is made up by the sledgehammer authenticity of Todd's vision, by a violent undercurrent of emotion that hits the viewer like a baseball bat clearing a drunken human path. I don't care about the reality, only the photographs matter and what they exist as - what they say - what they are - not what Todd is.

This is photography... as it should be. Giving a middle finger to genre, telling concept or categorization to kindly f-off, Todd has upped his ante with the new work and continues to be left to stand in his own space, defying classification... carving out his own path.

As it should be.

Look for a book to come... tentatively titled "Two Way Street" and an exhibition at Wirtz Gallery in the future. Todd's previous books, "House Hunting", "Outskirts", "Roaming" and "Between the Two" are out there but limited in availibility.

Todd Hido: American Suburb X Video Archive...

HERE

Regards,

dR

UPDATE:

Todd Hido Exhibition at Wirtz Gallery

"A Road Divided" - October 22 - December 20, 2008

"Stephen Wirtz Gallery presents A Road Divided, new landscape photographs by Todd Hido. Hido’s seasoned practice allows him intermittent moves between the genres of the Portrait and the Landscape, continually adding to and drawing from his ever-expanding archive of images. Following his 2006 debut of previously unseen portraits, Hido has focused his attention once again on the American landscape, a subject explored in his widely acclaimed 2004 series Roaming. Presented mostly in large scale, these photographs hit a new mark, with sublime referrals to painting as a means of aesthetic expression.

Driving lonely roads on the outskirts of American cities, Hido creates poignant images filled with inexplicable gravity, cinematic scenes of places that somehow reside in our collective memory, in a paradoxical realm where sense of place and a sense of displacement co-exist. In these new pictures, Hido demonstrates his fluidity within the daytime realm, putting aside the harder edge that characterizes his night work by photographing through veils of rain or ice. Delicately, potently embracing the beauty of the pictorial, Hido’s new pictures present an image plane that is often fully disintegrated, recalling impressionist painting. With an unquestionably modern affect, he often frames the compositions from inside his car, photographing straight through the windshield, using it as an additional lens and bringing the immediacy of a fleeting moment to these stationary scenes. The visionary experience he records unfolds from close, patient observation. Chance patterns of sprinkling raindrops on the windshield and sunlight breaking the shrouded sky combine to luminous yet unsettling effect

While Hido embraces the aesthetic, he does so with a critical eye. His vision is one of austerity, of America as an empty place, evidenced by crossroads, dead-end streets, broken trees, and highways that never end. Moody and psychological, his landscapes are metaphors for personal emotions, evoking dark things that keep us awake at night. And they are, in a larger sense, a remarkable record of the American Psyche at this moment in history. In them, we find the hopeful, but possibly final, turn-off in the road before the bridge to nowhere."