Color of Night

Todd Hido's ghostly, nocturnal images at G Fine Art.

By Matt Spangler

Roaming the suburban landscapes of his native Ohio and adopted San Francisco, Hido captures 10-minute nocturnal exposures of streets and homes. The halogen and fluorescent lights that shroud these vistas react with emulsion to create chromatic magic.

Hido admits to tweaking the warmth or coolness of the hues in the darkroom, but he swears the prints are never touched by a computer. The results are mostly astounding: the townhouse unit of "Untitled 2256-A," topped by a palm tree frond, is cast in an eerie yellow-green pallor. The domicile of "Untitled 2252" is soaked in a gorgeous Mediterranean blue, pierced by a solitary window light. And the pièce de résistance, "Untitled 2840," boasts a tricolor scheme: the green-yellow tint of a home, again violated by light pouring through a window; the black-white mix of the night sky, an adjacent structure, and a beat-up Chevy Cutlass Supreme; and a layer of light blue-coated snow stretching forth from the first home like a field of cotton candy.

The show is marred by an occasional misfire, such as "Untitled 3083," featuring a tree trunk and brush by a road coated in a pale yellow light that would look like an exposure error if printed at retail-standard 4 x 6 size.

Overall, Hido's work is a riot of color that is imbued with a haunting emptiness, affording a glimpse of how the landscape might look after a neutron bomb was dropped on it, destroying all traces of life but leaving the buildings intact. Not a single branch is atwitter, and one is amazed that in this hustle-bustle world a single 10-minute window of such tranquility could be found.

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Matt Spangler is in a "transitional" phase in his life, as they like to say in Washington when you've just been rightsized. He's seeking gainful employment as a writer, documentary filmmaker, photographer, or telecommunications executive. His work as a photographer can be seen at Gallery West in Old Town Alexandria.

Images by Todd Hido, courtesy of G Fine Art.