A Conversation with Todd Hido

Having just seen some of Todd Hido's images in Texas Monthly i was reminded of a chat I had with him last year on his photographic practice. It seemed a waste to have it on my computer so with Todd's kind permission a few extracts are posted here. There is also an interesting video of Mr Hido working and chatting here

On Travel

Travel is certainly a part of my work. Nothing is shot in my neighbourhood where I live now. Sometimes I can drive 20 minutes and find something and sometimes I have to fly across the country to find what I am looking for.

I think what matters often is being in the frame of mind for making work. It is hard to really clear your head when your daily stuff is going on. It often takes a trip to be able to get that kind of time to think and to focus on seeing.

One thing that is interesting thought is that no matter where I go to I find someplace that reminds me of where I grew up.

People ask me how I find my pictures. I tell them I drive around. I drive and drive and I mostly don’t find anything that is interesting to me. But then, something calls out. Something that looks sort of off or maybe an empty space. Sometimes it’s a sad scene. I like that kind of stuff. So I take the photos and some are good. And so I keep driving and looking and taking pictures.

On Beauty in the Mundane

‘Beauty in the Mundane’ is something that I really never think about. I am responding to a set of early experiences that happened in some very quotidian spaces. I have never set out to make beautiful pictures specifically in mundane places. but I do think that is what I often find. it is more of a visceral response when I see things I am attracted to.

On Stephen Shore, Jeff Brouws and New Topographics

I honestly do not think about labels and what camp I fall in. but I do think my work is akin to Shore’s and Brouws' but I am on some kind of an emotional investigation.

if there is any work I am intellectually playing off of as an afterthought it is the New Topographics work {Including the Becher's and Shore}

that work is very much about landscape and land use and is really about “place”. my pictures are more about people to me. with lewis baltz and robert adams we have literally photographed some of the same kind of places—theirs when it was new—mine when it had been occupied for 30 years. it is this lived in feeling that I Identify with. I grew up in those exact kind of homes.

On Image Narratives

All my images are made with a “single image” in mind—the one I am working on at that moment of shooting. the books and the sequences are made afterwards—often years later. I’d like to think I have this mental puzzle I am trying to solve in my head all at once but I know I don’t.

On Colour

My colour is all in the printing—in the traditional darkroom—made by me. I go to print usually 2-3 times a week and. my use of colour is ever evolving. the thing about printing night time stuff is that you are not locked into something looking a certain way or “neutral’ in colour as things look so different at night. not having to match a perception we have is very liberating. that has certainly carried over in all my work.

I still use film and traditional C-printing. I do the first prints of a negative myself in the darkroom for almost everything. I shoot sort of like a documentarian but I print like a painter. All my stuff is shot with natural light on a tripod. Untouched, and unstaged—with the exception of the portraits that are all staged to a point—but still are made using natural light in a fairly undirected way. In the darkroom I’ll twist it all around in anyway I find that works that still feels real to me. It is important for me that whatever I come up with always seems like it actually could have happened.