A Road Divided

by Todd Hido

Nazraeli Press is pleased to announce Todd Hido's new book of landscape photographs, A Road Divided, in which the artist again focuses his attention on the American landscape. Driving lonely roads on the outskirts of cities, Hido creates poignant images filled with inexplicable gravity, cinematic scenes of places that somehow exist in our collective memory. 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 effect, he often frames the compositions from inside his car, photographing straight through the windshield, using it as an additional lens and bringing a sense of timing and moment to these stationary scenes. Todd Hido's photographs have been exhibited internationally, and are included in numerous museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Genres: Photography

30 pages, Hardcover

First published March 25, 2010

About the author

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, the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Pier 24 Photography, as well as in many other public and private collections. He has over a dozen published books; his most recent monograph titled Excerpts from Silver Meadows was released in 2013, along with an innovative b-sides box set designed to function as a companion piece to his award-winning monograph in 2014.

Reviews

[Chris Schneider · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first thing you notice: This gigantic (and expensive) book won't fit on your bookshelf. The size certainly overpowers all else.

The second would be the images. As expected, many of the images are stunning. Always simple, going against conventional wisdom of what a good photograph is, his foggy, wet, low horizon landscapes are moody and moving. This starts slow and rather conventional, but once you get 4 or 5 images in, in my view the real creativity and surprise begins. It peters out toward the end, and some images really feel out of place, but the book really shines in places.

The third thing is the introductory quote by Jean Beaudrillard. It is perhaps the most memorable for me. The honesty of it is moving, and sets a unique tone for the book, acknowledging that his best days are behind him, but his past successes enable him to have some extra leeway to continue on.

[Orest Mercator · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moody impressionist photography with a real Anselm Kiefer vibe! I liked getting to see this side of Hido—less manicured, more sturm und drang. Love the creamy bokeh’s, showers of light crystals, lens spots, and double-ish exposed looks. It’s a really evocative collection—even if some of the images are a little too bare and un-crisp.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Todd Hido is one of my favorite photographers, and this latest book does not disappoint. While it lacks some of the more sinister feeling evoked in his Outskirts and House Hunting collections, it captures the melancholy of lonely roads, grey skies and sparse landscapes in a way I've never seen before. But Hido's stuff always feels like I've never seen anything like it before - he always surprises me, and I love that.

Part of why A Road Divided is remarkable is how Hido uses inclement weather - rain and snow. He is not afraid to have raindrops blurring and blotching the image and actually uses it to incredible effect. Photographs #6405, #5484 and #6242 have water smearing and blurring the image, making it look more like a painting than a photograph. Photos like these recall the paintings of the Romantic painters Turner and Friedrich, though for Hido, wildness and the sublime are not found on the summits of mountains or in raging waterfalls and avalanches. Hido's sublime comes in lonely roads, frozen fields, off-kilter power line poles, twisted trees and distant headlights.

What seems most wonderful and somewhat mystifying is how Hido's photos, through tapping into the desolate, lonely, gray aspects of the world, finds something deeply transcendent as well.