Foto Fest
FOTOFEST 2010 BIENNIAL
FotoFest Exhibitions

Todd Hido

 
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FORECLOSED HOMES

When I was asked in 2009 to edit a volume of the periodical Witness, I immediately interpreted my task as a literal one—to edit together a selection of images that reflected our current state. What, right now, was I witness too?

I thought, “How could I not start with revisiting my foreclosed home photographs?” I made them back in the mid 1990s in Los Angeles—the City of Dreams. I have always been haunted by these places, thinking of all these broken lives, and how they mirrored my own unstable childhood.

When I made these images, I was interested in making pictures of places that were ultimately about people.

Homes and home loans are at the heart of our seriously troubled economic situation. It deeply saddens me that there were a total of 861,664 families that lost their homes to foreclosure in 2008. It was estimated that the total number of foreclosures for 2009 would exceed the 3.5 million mark.

Walls do talk. I hope that these images get at some part of this state we’re in, in their own quiet way.

- Todd Hido



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A ROAD DIVIDED

I drive. I drive a lot.

People ask me how I find my pictures. I tell them that 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.

- Todd Hido




BIOGRAPHY
Todd Hido is a San Francisco Bay area-based artist whose work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Metropolis, The Face, I-D, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as in many other public and private collections. He is an adjunct professor at the California College of Art, San Francisco, California.