Todd Hido, Recent Work
I was never a fan of the work that Todd Hido became famous for. His photographs of vacant homes and apartments at night seemed too conceptually pat to me; I took him as a one-trick pony, and for years, he showed very little that would change my mind about that. Even worse, I didn’t think he was particularly good at that one trick. The problem boiled down, in my eyes, to the unteachable skill of “knowing where to stand” when you take the photo. Walker Evans knew every time. Hido, I thought, rarely got it right. His foregrounds were dead and distracting; the compositions were bland and static.
But this is Your Daily Awesome, not Your Daily Visit to Hear Me Bitch About Artists I Don’t Like. I say all of the above to convey my own surprise at how much I’ve been enjoying Hido’s recent work. My favorites are the new nudes on his site, which I find uncommonly erotic and psychological, and I’m not easily wowed by contemporary nude photos. His seacape photograph in the new issue of Wired (pictured here) is stunning, and some of his new landscapes are quite good, too, although that whole “where to stand thing” hasn’t gotten much better in the bulk of them.
In any case, I was really excited to see him do something new with the nudes and portraits, and this is one of those times that I’m more than happy to change my mind about something and give credit where credit is due. I thought I had seen more than enough Todd Hido for one lifetime; now I’m eager to see what he does next.
