Todd Hido — Intimate Distance — La Galerie Particulière — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 22 → November 19, 2016

« During more then 20 years, Todd Hido has worked on several substantial groups of pictures, often simultaneously. When each group has come into focus as a project, Hido has published it as a book and exhibited it as a suite of prints. What we have here is a chronological sequence drawn from the full depth and breadth of his singular oeuvre. Wandering through and around, searching and returning…

If these photographs and their arrangement seem narrative, it is because they suggest untold tales and possibility. The suggestions are as much yours as they are Hido’s, and as likely to come from cinema and literature as they are from personal experience…

These photographs are made slowly—there are few grabbed shutter instants here—but like so much of the best photography, they seem to have been prompted by flashes of recognition, when the world-as-image corresponded to something half-remembered, unstated but insistent. The images are sumptuous and full of things to look at: landscapes, byways, signs, suburbia, interiors, fabrics, and faces. But they give the equally strong impression that this factual-fictional world is less than full. Each image is plenty, yet not quite enough. For all the river of color, for all the thickness of these atmospheres, Hido has the economy of a minimalist…

So many of Hido’s images hinge on this duality: the retrospective and the prospective. The fact and the wish. The presence and the possibility. His statement that he “photographs like a documentarian but prints like a painter”. It is a constant balancing act, avoiding the sentimentality of “what was” and the cheap melodrama of performed fiction».

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Extracts from the text « Light and Dark Chambers » by David Campany,
from the catalog « Intimate Distance » Textuel editions, 2016.