Casemore Kirkeby is pleased to present Todd Hido, Intimate Distance. Intimate Distance is Hido’s first mid-career survey to date and opens in conjunction with the release of his monograph from Aperture of the same title. The monograph is Hido’s first publication to approach the full breadth of his oeuvre chronologically. Casemore Kirkeby’s exhibition draws from the book’s breathtaking scope, with a focus on images made in the last four years. A special section features a suite of Hido’s very early, never-before-shown black-and-white pictures, where we see his unmistakable photographic voice start to take shape.
In the most recent work occupying the main gallery, Hido further loosens his relationship to narrative in favor of a complete submersion in the sumptuous visual language of cinema. Monochromatic washes of color bleed from image to image; a winter moonrise viewed through a web of trees gives way to a battered fence cast in shades of ochre, and an empty interior glowing orange through faded curtains. Hido’s content is still there but further unhinged from its indexical relationship to the concrete world—images, colors, impressions echo back to one another as if in secret communion. The portraits, in particular, punctuate the atmosphere, as if emerging out of the ether. The women in Hido’s photographs are immersed in their dramas—omnipresent, but detached; they are larger than life, as if photographed directly from a movie screen inside a darkened theater. Color takes center stage in these new images, and fabrics, lipstick, skin are rendered in vivid hues with full photographic seduction—apparitions of light made tangible, impossibly close. Intimate Distance shows Hido at his most masterful and showcases what a true talent can evolve into—an artist in full command of his subject matter.
Over the past 25 years, Todd Hido has refined a point of view that is both familiar and unsettling. His images are manifestations of a deep and sustained interest in the way photography works on our personal and collective consciousness, especially within the American cultural landscape. The work recollects our first confrontations with the larger world through magazines, newspapers, and movies and the awkward, sometimes heartbreaking intimacy of photographing, being photographed, and looking at photographs of others.
While often shining light on harsh contemporary realities in his imagery—home foreclosures, the post-industrial landscape, the decline of working class neighborhoods—Hido weaves in elements of personal history, American mythos and sublime beauty, charging the empty spaces with possibility, anticipation and a roving, unquenchable sense of loss.
Hido has also developed a cult following for his publications, which are his primary point of departure and, most recently, the place where his intersecting narratives coalesce into something more complex and elliptical than the sum of their parts. Through the various outlets he restlessly moves between, from masterfully edited books to limited edition zines, magazine portfolios, exhibitions and his Instagram account, the solitary experience of the photographer meets the collective experience of looking. In Hido’s world, we are all in the theater together.
Todd Hido (born in Kent, Ohio, 1968) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist whose work has been featured in Artforum, the New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Wired, Elephant, Foam, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as in many other public and private collections. He has published over a dozen books, including House Hunting (2001), Roaming (2004), and Excerpts from Silver Meadows (2013). In 2014, Aperture published Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors and the Nude as part of The Photography Workshop Series. Hido’s mid-career survey Intimate Distance: Twenty-five Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album will be widely available in October 2016.
