The Existential Sense of Roaming
By Cinzia Villanucci
In his latest work, Roaming: New Landscapes, presented at the Julie Saul Gallery up to October 16, Todd Hido brings the spectator into the photographer’s own perspective along the way as he travels by car through Eastern Washington State, the California Central Valley, Indiana, South Louisiana and beyond.
Each of the eighteen new color landscape images is shot from the driver’s seat and through the car’s windshields. The settings in Hido’s photographs express a peculiar anonymity: no people are caught by the lenses; no physical evidence of human activity. There’s no life, no action, no movement apparent in them. This solitude is unsettling: what are these haunted places? what lurks in these expanses?
Hido catches the landscapes in a diffused light, when the sun is below the horizon, dipping them into a nocturnal dimension. The windshield of the car obscures the images further. In some of Hido’s photographs, a sense of menace pushes the spectator to the edge of an epiphany. Therein lies the strong appeal of Hido’s new work. By capturing isolated landscapes–a road leading nowhere, a place occupied only by a few telephone poles, a ruined palisade, or a bridge in penumbra–Hido creates a dense metaphysical atmosphere. In some of the photographs, one area of the image seems to have been shaken or distorted further, something unexpected, like a vibration, or presence made manifest; this lends an element of "imperfection" to the scene. Every element in the picture acquires a distinctive, intangible quality: a resonating aura, which causes us to shudder. But it’s just that element, that wrinkle that gives movement and life to the whole picture. In the momentary shift which takes place in our perceptive mechanism, Hido’s pictures seem to accelerate in space, as if real time has been overwhelmed by existential time. That is time as it was intended by the French philosopher Henry Bergson: the dur�e against the quantitative time defined by numerical spatial categories. In Hido’s photographs, the qualitative density of time comes to the surface, and is made visible, which is the existential time of his roaming.
