Roaming : Landscape Photographs 1994-2004

Todd Hido
Roaming : Landscape Photographs 1994-2004
Photographs: Todd Hido
Text: Raymond Carver
Publisher: Nazraeli Press
Pictures: 25
Year: 2004
Comments: Hardcover under dust jacket, 290 x 365 mm. First edition, 2004. Text in english. In very good condition.
For one thing, he didn’t want to be seen as a ‘a one trick pony.’ After the critical and general success of House Hunting and Outskirts, Todd Hido wanted to create a book that had no homes in it. He also made a concerted effort to shoot primarily in the daytime. In that way, Roaming, which is a book of landscape photographs taken over ten years and published in 2004, demonstrates a purposeful shift in Hido’s work. Roaming is a physical move out of the driveway and onto the open road, once the sun has risen.
Psychologically, however, this book of landscapes exhibits the same rumination of his previous books. It demonstrates a meditation — or preoccupation — over how people live. The photographer or viewer may have left the hazy suburban ‘home’ portrayed in House Hunting and Outskirts, but the sensation of it remains. Go as far as you can, but you never leave yourself. Rather than consecutive, the photographs in Roaming feel persistent; a reoccurring feeling that rattles between the internal and external world, behind the windshield, no matter the scenery outside.
Hido keeps at least three water bottles with him in his car. One time, I watch him spray his windshield before taking a landscape photograph. ‘I’ve learned from sheer disappointment that sometimes I need to take pictures, but it isn’t raining outside,’ he says.
Sometimes the artist sprays glycerin on the windshield, for a different kind of effect. It’s a technique he compares to changing paintbrushes. The size, direction and position of drops of water on the car window inform the photograph that results, and within these fictitious raindrops, Hido says he can ‘compose’ the real picture that he wants to see. Ultimately, each photograph is a composition. It is a way of giving shape to a mental state, as opposed to capturing an actual setting.
Every one of Hido’s landscapes, free of the human figure, is littered with human presence. Hido’s landscapes show telephone poles and electric wires, the road, the window through which it’s seen; they show both means and barriers of communication.
‘I can’t take photographs of pure nature,’ says Hido. ‘The view I’m photographing doesn’t exist unless you can drive up to it.’ So these are not retreats into the outdoor or ‘natural’ world. Rather, they are attempted (and ultimately failed) escapes from an internal one.
Katya Tylevich













more books by Todd Hido
-
House Hunting (Signed)
by Todd Hido
sold -
One Picture Book # 60 : Crooked Cracked Tree in Fog (WITH A SI...
by Todd Hido
sold -
JGS : Witness number seven
by Todd Hido
sold -
House Hunting
by Todd Hido
sold -
Between the Two (SIGNED)
by Todd Hido
sold -
One Picture Book # 93 : Seasons Road (WITH A SIGNED PRINT)
by Todd Hido
sold -
A Road divided (SIGNED)
by Todd Hido
sold -
Excerpts from Silver Meadows
by Todd Hido
Euro 200
more books tagged »color« | >> see all
-
Teikou / Resistance (Colour) (Signed) Only 150 copies.
by Kazuo Kitai
Euro 150 -
Provincial City (Signed)
by Atsushi Yoshie
sold -
A plastic tool
by Maya Rochat
sold -
Sun and Health
by Ryan McGinley
sold -
Jeddah Diary (Signed)
by Olivia Arthur
sold -
BRUSSEL…?
by Wouter Deruytter
sold
more books tagged »nazraeli« | >> see all
-
South East (SIGNED)
by Mark Steinmetz
sold -
Greater Atlanta (Signed)
by Mark Steinmetz
sold -
Inner City (Signed)
by Joseph Mills
sold -
One Picture Book # 12 : Alders (SIGNED WITH A PRINT)
by Robert Adams
sold -
É (SIGNED)
by Masao Yamamoto
sold -
One Picture Book # 90 : Self (WITH A SIGNED PRINT)
by Daido Moriyama
sold
more books tagged »landscape« | >> see all
-
Concrete Abstraction
by Toshio Shibata
sold -
PINE VALLEY (SPECIAL SIGNED LTD EDT WITH PRINT)
by Robert Adams
sold -
Agrarlandschaften
by Heinrich Riebesehl
sold -
SASANAMI
by Masao Yamamoto
sold -
Spring, 2011
by Seiji Kumagai
sold -
Tableaux 1978-1982 (SIGNED)
by Jean-Marc Bustamante
sold
more books tagged »american photography« | >> see all
-
Women
by Saul Leiter
sold -
Found Photos in Detroit (In shrink-wrap)
by Arianna Arcara & Luca Santese
sold -
The Americans
by Robert Frank
sold -
Women are beautiful (Hard cover)
by Garry Winogrand
sold -
Figments from the real world
by Garry Winogrand
sold -
The Incredible Case of the stack O' Wheats murders (Signed)
by Les Krims
sold
Books from the Virtual Bookshelf josefchladek.com