Todd Hido

Todd Hido is an American photographer and artist who lives in San Francisco and who studied under Larry Sultan.  He was born in 1968 and teaches as well as practicing and exhibiting.  Some of his work has been used for book covers notably novels by Raymond Carver.

Many of his photographs are of urban and suburban spaces that give a sense of bleak loneliness, isolation, emptiness.  He also photographs interiors that convey similar feelings of personal alienation.  Nearly all his photographs of buildings are taken at night or early morning.  The lights are always on inside the houses and apartments he photographs (apart from one image at the date of the interview - link below) and that luminescence seems to convey a sense of who the humans inside are.  The light appears to have personality and emotion.

One of the most interesting things for me at this moment as I look at Part 3 of TAOP is the colour in Hido’s works. 

He uses analogue film and produces large highly detailed prints.  Light in every photograph plays a major role and the colour of that light conveys character and mood.

I have looked specifically at Todd Hido’s work in relation to my own colour assignment work.  The very distinct colour and the way Hido uses light is extremely interesting and evocative and crucially reminds me that there is more than one way to incorporate colour into an image.

In addition to Hido’s landscapes he also produces portraits of women in similar interiors to the ones he makes without people, images that I find upsetting.  I am particularly interested in these.  When I first came across them after someone on Flickr had suggested I look at Todd Hido’s work I felt enraged by the images - perhaps, according to a few, demonstrating a naivete in me, as far worse images of women exist in vast quantities, some hidden from everyday life and some blatantly on display as if such images were perfectly acceptable: page 3 models advertised as six foot posters on buses is one example - and in fact Todd Hido's images are far, far more honest and real than page 3 images which are frankly ridiculous, fantastical and offensive.  Todd Hido looks at the undercurrent of such images, I think.  Some of Hido's images I am referring to paint a seedy, lonely sense of powerlessness.  It infuriated me that women should be depicted this way in this context.  I must add that there are also portraits of women in his work who seem empowered and at ease with themselves.  However, I am discussing images where that is not the case.  I don't think I was enraged by Todd Hido himself who is merely exploring something that exists in the world and is worth looking at for sure - and I understand that possibly he is questioning a reality and asking his viewers to confront something difficult.  But I certainly felt furious by the fact that women in that light should exist at all, dis-empowered, diminished.  Maybe it is something to do with where I was at the time.  Maybe I'm just being judgmental and censorious.  I suspect, however, there is an extremely accurate reflection of how some men like to see women in the images and of how women sometimes can be.  That women should be there at all, or anyone else for that matter is enraging.  What I see in the images is a sense of abusive power, within the fantasy depicted, and deep, deep loneliness in every player within the image – the women, the implied presence of an Other (male) even if he may have left the scene, the photographer, and finally in the viewer.  There is a desperately lonely and vulnerable sense to many of these women, isolated, undressed, in bleak rooms.  I don’t see strength.  One of the things that comes to mind when I look at the images is that these women were once little girls with dreams and fantasies and hopes.  And that all of that has become warped, degraded and lost.  Lost hope.
Hido is extremely present in all his images.  But this is most apparent in the series where he has taken photographs from behind the windscreen of his car or through his car door window.  The texture of the rain falling on the window or of the dirt on the windscreen reminds us of his being there, photographing these scenes.  His mood is conveyed very clearly I think.  Thinking about the photographer as a crucial part of the whole scene is something I have not considered in depth before, which seems a little odd.

I have returned to these images after seeing them initially a few months ago because the themes that I mention here – the degradation of those little girl’s dreams and hope is something that I think I am exploring in the work I’m preparing for the colour assignment, although certainly from a woman's point of view and obviously with a woman's way of approaching it.  It’s difficult to be certain as I’m still working on it and I’m not entirely sure where it is going (or if I even like or value it!).  But returning to Hido’s work will no doubt have some impact.

Information gleaned from Wikipedia, ToddHido.com and an interview from Ahorn Magazine – (2008-11)