LIGHT FROM WITHIN

To launch the new post-summer season in September, Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire has the pleasure of announcing the solo exhibition of American photographer Todd Hido: Light from Within. The gallery will host an exceptional set of images from the Houses at Night series, which made Hido famous. Bright Black World, which tackles, with continued force and beauty, the tragic question of our landscapes undergoing change, complements this group. And a few of his emblematic portraits are spread throughout this panorama. Parallel to the exhibition, the book House Hunting will be republished by Nazraeli Press. 

House Hunting is the perfect image of Todd Hido’s artistic and physical wandering; the artist travelled through America by car in order to capture its mystery. The subject is clear, titled without frills: houses seen at night. And yet, the treatment of the image, so recognisable, leads spectators towards a more romantic symbolism, tinged with a certain nostalgia. Its artistic filter is hazy like the mind. To make our imagination more fecund and to stimulate our projections, the presence of mankind is merely implicit. No shadow puppet silhouette. This absence reinforces the work’s mysterious charge and only by the faint glow that emanates from these houses do we guess that they’re inhabited. 

“There is no object more deeply mysterious, no object more pregnant with suggestion, more insidiously sinister, in short more truly dazzling than a window lit up from within by even a single candle. What we can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what we can perceive taking place behind a pane of windowglass. In that pit, in that blackness or brightness, life is being lived, life is suffering, life is dreaming.” -Charles Baudelaire 

With Bright Black World, Todd Hido exits from the American suburbs to explore the desolate landscapes of northern Europe. The psychological geography and interpretation are something else altogether: although he still plays with the aesthetic duality which characterises his work, between strangeness and the sublime, light and shadow, the planet which he describes is now an unfamiliar, post-apocalyptic territory. The humanity suggested in House Hunting has disappeared into the darkness, condemned by its own errors. 

« There is no question that this work is about the physicality of climate change that is occurring now. Unless you are in full-blown denial, as unfortunately many people are, these changes are coming far quicker than anybody expected…». Todd Hido.