Todd Hido: The Poetry of Darkness
Photographer Todd Hido is best known for the evocative images he captured while driving through neighborhoods at night, photographing homes whose glowing windows suggest untold stories, but reveal little. For more than twenty-five years, he returned literally and metaphorically to memories and experiences of growing up in Kent, Ohio, finding romance in the mundane. More recently, prompted by global climatic change and the darkening political atmosphere, he began examining a world seemingly on the edge of apocalypse, dominated by lowering skies and eerie light. The Poetry of Darkness explores the landscape domestic and foreign, as well as portraiture, to which he has returned repeatedly in his career.
Hido has designed and produced eight monographs of his work, which has also been featured in publications including Artforum, the New York Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, and Wired. His book House Hunting (2001) was named Best First Monograph by Photo-Eye. He exhibits internationally and his photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California.