Todd Hido American, b. 1968

A white Persian sits square in the middle of the frame on a shag carpet the colour of dried brick, its coat matted into loose points down the chest, its eyes a flat amber, looking just past the lens. Behind it, floor-to-ceiling wood panelling in warm vertical grain fills the whole wall. At the right edge a dark mat and a strip of baseboard mark where the room turns a corner. Nothing in the picture is styled; everything in it is furnished.

The cat is the least interesting thing here and it knows it. What holds the eye is the panelling and the carpet, that particular American brown that ran from the mid-seventies through the early eighties and coated millions of dens and rec rooms, a decor of warmth achieved entirely with dye. Hido photographed this in 1996, which means the room was already dated when he found it, still in service, still somebody's idea of comfortable.

That is the value of the thing. Interiors like this were photographed constantly at the time, on Instamatics, in colour, badly, and almost none of that survives except in shoeboxes. A picture made deliberately, on a tripod, in available light, in the same rooms and the same brown, ends up as the record the snapshots could not be. Fashion did not preserve this look and neither did design magazines. A cat sitting on it did.