“The black sun of melancholy”1
Desolate landscapes, sad, worried faces, golds emerging from grey dawns or black twilights… Todd Hido’s new photographs are imbued with melancholy. Bare trees struggling in the mist, fallen trees blown down by the wind, deserted horizons and roads… it is the solitude (of beings and of nature) that emanates from these landscapes that could be linked to a new dark romanticism. A very cinematographic lyricism, however: mixing his portraits and his landscapes, the American photographer allows us to enter into their intimacy and to imagine the narrative links that could connect them… Also very cinematographic, the point of view of the windscreen of his car (often fogged up or sparse with drops of water) that the photographer frequently chooses to adopt: stemming from his long solitary wanderings in search of the image that will “make an image” through its beauty and strangeness, this truncated panorama framing evokes the still shots taken from films to arouse confusion and arouse curiosity. Similarly, the contrast between natural and artificial light, which Hido plays with a Lynchian audacity…
1Gérard de Nerval’s famous oxymoron from his Chimeres (1854)
Todd Hido – The Black Mechanism
Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire
17, rue des filles-du-Calvaire, Paris III
Until June 18th
Stéphanie Dulout