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| Todd Hido: Untitled #5157 [from Roaming], 2005 |
Frequent viewers of photo-eye Auctions will have noticed the recent shift in focus. With ten-plus years as a leader in the sale of rare, signed and limited edition photobooks, we are thrilled to connect you with prints by sought after artists. Currently on the block are two prints from Todd Hido's series Roaming. When it appeared in 2004, Todd Hido’s book Roaming was a fairly radical departure from the work that put him on the map, namely his masterful nighttime images of suburban houses from the series House Hunting and Outskirts.
Roaming explores the rather traditional genre of landscape in a way that would be recognizable to painters from as far back as the 17th century. Hido employs themes familiar to the New Topographic photographers: the desolate ‘non-sites’ that are the liminal spaces between place and ‘non-place,’ elevating them into a quietly atmospheric sublime. Like them, he shows subtle, skewed traces of human alteration, such as the diamond-shaped yellow-orange road signs that pick out the horizon line in #4155a. But unlike them, his aim does not ever seem to be socio-environmental critique. Rather his goal seems cinematic: the drama of these pictures is a function not just of their heavy, overcast lighting — the eerily blue-hued sky of #5157; the muted grey-brown dusk of #4155a — but also of the forlorn roads and fields. In #5157, one almost expects Samuel Beckett’s hobos, Vladimir and Estragon, from Waiting for Godot to come hobbling into the frame to collect themselves beneath the lone tree by the side of the road at the center of the frame.
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| Todd Hido: Untitled #4155a [from Roaming], 2005 |
The photos in the Roaming series were taken during lengthy excursions by car to different parts of the country. Yet to extent that these pictures fit into the great American genre of the road trip, Hido gives it a distinctly post-apocalyptic cast: the road-tripper as solitary traveller, who may have lost his or her bearings in almost any small town in the middle of the US. Hido’s is a post-Romantic experience of nature, rooted in the ambiguity of the environment. It is inseparable from the experience of the vehicle, and thus supremely Modern and inherently American.
Each of these lush, oversized prints measures 38x30" (96.52x76.2 cm) and is from an edition of five (plus an artist’s proof). Each is signed, titled, dated and numbered on verso.
For more information and to place a bid, visit photo-eye Auctions.