TODD HIDO

Rivalry Projects is pleased to announce a Project Space installation featuring nine photographs by Todd Hido. Several of these images appear in his signature monograph House Hunting. On view is Hido’s “Homes at Night” series, in which portraits of the exteriors of houses become stand-ins for their occupants and a cypher for the darkness of American life.

House Hunting is, on the one hand, a portrait of a certain America at that specific moment in history: this is an economically downtrodden place, dark and empty homes with the dirty laundry barely packed, or homes with the lights on but radiating no warmth. Simultaneously, this is a portrait of America — and specifically, suburban America — from any contemporary post-war decade: a raw look at white paint chipping off of picket fences.

Hido’s work has echoes of the ’70s adolescence he spent in his hometown of Kent, Ohio, a city scarred by the 1970 shooting of four college students by the Ohio Army National Guard during a Vietnam War protest. His unique landscapes—frequently devoid of active human figures, yet suffused with energy—resonate because they feel as though they have been directly pulled from the recesses of your own memory.

‘I take photographs of houses at night because I wonder about the families inside them,’ Hido tells me. ‘I wonder about how people live, and the act of taking that photograph is a meditation.’ House Hunting, therefore, is more question than answer. A rumination without resolution.

It would seem that in order for these pictures to exist, the photographer would need to be a voyeur, but Hido denies secrecy. He says he keeps himself obvious, even when shooting in the dark. When somebody calls the police, he is quick to make the distinction between photographer and criminal. ‘You’re allowed to take pictures in public,’ Hido says. ‘It’s interesting that so many people regard their surroundings as inherently private. Hido heightens that sense of false privacy. Amplifies it, to show the cracks in the edifices.

Todd Hido is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist whose work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Wired, Elephant, FOAM, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Getty, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as in many other public and private collections. Most notably, Pier 24 Photography holds the archive of all his published works. 

Hido’s photographs of suburban landscapes are taken during solitary, long drives. The main subject of his work is the quality of natural and artificial light in the American landscape, as in reflected sunrays or the illumination of a television pouring from an anonymous window. Hido takes his pictures in a “fairly undirected way”, he says, but edits his negatives together and manipulates them until he produces an image that represents his encounter with a place. In describing his process, Hido said, “I shoot sort of like a documentarian, but I print like a painter.”

WORKS