Photographing the underbelly of the American dream, Todd Hido takes a voyeuristic view of tawdry suburban houses lit from within at night, naked and scantily clad women lying on unmade beds in cheap hotel rooms, and romantic landscapes shot through rain swept windshields from the driver’s seat of a car. Menacing and strange, like scenes out of film noir cinema or the poetic imaginings of a reclusive painter, Hido’s dark vision of suburbia, its outskirts, and the people that pass through them both seem truer to fact today than in the distant past, when Americans contemplated a better future and got it. Hido captures the poverty that remains and beautifully juxtaposes the results in a haunting exhibition at New York’s Bruce Silverstein Gallery.
