News/Events

DATE: September 25, 2009

Todd Hido at Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Hido's American landscapes—fallow fields, empty roads, a few bare trees—are seen in passing through dirty windshields, so his photographs appear smudged and indistinct.

The effect is self-consciously painterly, recalling nineteenth-century pictorialism, but it's nearly drained of romance, and the vistas are resolutely ordinary. Wintry light and wet weather combine for an underwater feeling, as if we were peering through a fish tank at a place that rarely sees sun. In the front space, Nicolai Howalt's "Car Crash Studies" have echoes of Weegee and John Chamberlain, but some of the material is so raw it resists aesthetic transformation.

From The New Yorker.

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