ABOUT

Todd Hido considers Excerpts from Silver Meadows, published in 2013, the ‘culmination’ of everything he had put into his books prior to this point. And it came together at the ‘perfect moment,’ he says. At a point when he kept hearing that the future of publication would be ‘e-books’, and when photography was widely understood as a form of rapid and feathery documentation (‘selfies’), Hido wanted to create a book that ‘could only be a physical, tangible experience.’

Of note are the four gatefolds of Excerpts from Silver Meadows, ‘intended to further the notion of having to peel back the layers of what can exist inside the pages of a book,’ says Hido. The other result of having ‘super-size gatefolds,’ he says, is that ‘viewers have to sit their asses down and get off of their phones to look through each page.’ This is a book created as the result of considerable time and thought. It is meant to be experienced through considerable time and thought, as well.

Excerpts from Silver Meadows is a challenging composition of portraits, landscapes, personal and vintage photographs and documents that tell a number of stories — or one story, in different ways. As always, those stories reveal themselves through shadows, and never under direct light. On the other hand, this is perhaps Hido’s most openly ‘personal’ work, crossing a previous border of apparent privacy.