I stumbled over this touching, strong photograph.
The story goes like this:
Stephen Wirtz Gallery is pleased to present
Excerpts from Silver Meadows,
an exhibition of new photographs by Todd Hido.
Sequenced to form an almost cinematic narrative,
atmospheric landscapes of in-between, and isolated
places in America provide the setting,
and portraits of female subjects,
broken starlets in suburban dress,
stand in as the main characters.
While the subject matter
is mined from Hido’s own experience
growing up in Kent, Ohio,
what results is a collectively familiar,
yet entirely imaginary and dreamlike melodrama
untethered from a specific time and place,
a visual pulp novel of Midwest mythology.
All of this is very well put.
This project could be as described above,
but it lacks exactness. Todd Hido uses the wet window shield of his car
as a filter to avoid the everyday look of the photographic image.
But quite a few of his photographs lack substance,
when this effect is removed in a thought experiment.
Still there is a nucleus,some very good images, visualizing a bad dream,
and uneasy memories unexpectedly popping up, after a night of agitated sleep.
This women, Marilyn Monroe in black,
looks like as if she would be lost in time.
A displaced person.
Her gaze offers loss, and she is offering us her breasts,
defenseless and sad, looking hurt.
Cold sun, a home torn apart by disasters,
mother and child in a desert of darkness
observed by a cruel cat, status symbol
and suburban joy.
