From left to right; #2027-B (1997); #2024 (1997); #1447-A (1994) ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT, Huxley Parlour
I am new to the medium of photography; and to photobook-making as an artistic practice. My husband Joshua, who is a photographer himself, introduced me to the form of photography early in our relationship through his own work and through sharing the work of others like Chris Killip, Jesse Lenz and Bryan Shutmaat.
I adopted my husband's fascination for the medium over time (most notably on our honeymoon in Budapest where I was introduced to the work of Hungarian photographers André Kertész, Robert Capa and Wanda Martin). Like my husband, I listen to Sasha Wolf's conversational podcast Photoworks.
Todd Hido was the most recent guest on Photowork. Known for photographs that reflects the American urban and suburban landscape, Hido's work explores subtle variations of darkness and light. Shadows sharpen the cinematic quality of his portrait and landscape scenes. Each photograph is numbered in the order in which it was taken.
I scroll through Hido's portfolio online, slower – then slower still. His photographs glister with electricity. I move from #1773 (1996), a tarpaulin-covered car in winter, to #11896-4220751, woman starkly framed in black. There is striking energy to the captured moment. On the podcast, Wolf quotes Hido:
As an artist I have always felt that my task is not to create meaning but to charge the air so that meaning can occur.
I wrestle with this phrase for a couple days, determined to understand what he means by "charge the air." I talk to my photographer husband, who is more familiar with Hido's work, and then I write a list of questions that I would ask Hido himself:
Does an artist charge the work or do they charge the space in which one experiences the work? Does the charge occur at the moment of creation, or does it happen in the editorial process that follows. How do you know if a moment is chargeable? Is it always possible to capture a charged moment?
I find the answers in a conversation between Todd Hido and Joerg Colberg. According to Hido, "You charge the air by photographing the right person, allowing them to be real, and by making a potent image." I believe this sentiment also applies to his landscape work.
I learn that there are two steps in Hido's process for "charging the air."
The first is unedited. Here, Hido collaborates with the world "as it is," shooting "with natural light on a tripod." His work is "untouched, and unstaged." The second step is technical. In the darkroom, Hido "twists" his work in any way that makes the photograph "still feel real." To Hido, it is important that whatever he comes up with always seems like it actually could have happened; in the world where it may not have done at the time of its taking. Hido separates himself into first, documentarian; and second, painter.
I become fascinated by Hido's idea of "charging the air". I compare his method to my own artistic practice as a poet. Writing, I imagine myself as an archeologist. The world feels like my dig site. I collaborate with what I find. My work becomes the product of this collaboration. I begin my deep excavation with heavy shovels; over time, turning my hand to smaller movements. I carefully probe the world around me. The uncovered poem is charged with collaboration. The finished piece, a reflection of what was already there with what I have unearthed. Like Hido, I "charge the air" by investing myself (my hope, my imagination, my curiousity, my faith) in what I have found.
Hido's work is an attempt to understand memory – "how we replay, and recreate our lives over and over again." For Hido, "charging the air" turns his reflected world into a timepiece or mirror, so that anyone who reflects upon it finds themselves reflected in it.
We find this idea presented in art throughout history. Art, in any form, reflects what the world is like, what it wants, where it wants to go, who it wants to be, and we – as viewers and artists – are the ones who make it so. We have the power to change and be changed through the art we make.
This is why 'the mirror' is used persuasively in art throughout history.
For example, Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), where a man's immoral character has been impressed upon a mirror, and Lewis Caroll's children's book Through the Looking Glass (1872), in which a young woman named Alice re-envisions her world as a dreamscape.
Painters, also, used the mirror as a symbol of introspection, desire, reflection and identity. For example, John William Waterhouse portrays a young woman looking into her mirror in Mariana in the South (1897), Trevor Makinson asserts his self-portrait in In My Studio Mirror (1952) and James Cowie softens the window view of an inside/outside scene in his The Looking Glass (1940).
Today, visitors to the Tate Modern Museum in London interact with Yayoi Kusama's unique vision of endless reflections in her installation "Infinity Mirror Rooms - Filled with the Brilliance of Life 2011/2017." The mirror continues to be a prevalent image in art.
Hido's contemporary work and artistic process reminds me that everything from painterly landscapes to the portrait of another human being has the power to become a mirror, and it is our responsibility to recognise our reflection and respond.
Todd Hido, #3223, 2003, ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT, Downloaded from Huxley Parlour
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Sasha Wolf is the author of Photoworks: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice and host of the Photoworks podcast. Wolf specialises in contemporary photography, with significant focus on documentary and post-documentary based work. The work of the artists represented by Sasha Wolf projects is held in the collections of major museums and corporate spaces. "Sasha Wolf Projects is a private art space that specialises in the advocacy and placement of photographic art by some of the most exciting emerging, mid and late-career photographers and process artists."
Todd Hido is an American photographer based in San Francisco Bay. Featured twice on Wolf's Photoworks podcast, Hido has published 17 photography books, and his work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair, among others. His photographs are on display in the permanent collections of the Getty, the Guggenheim Museum, New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.
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"Todd Hido - Episode 81." Photowork, Sasha Wolf. July 19.
Colberg, Joel. "A conversation with Tod Hiddo" (Conscientious).
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