Todd Hido American, b. 1968

Three cypress trunks rise straight through the middle of the frame and divide the house behind them into strips of white clapboard. The gable end carries one small window, curtained, faintly lit. A chainlink fence and a run of overgrown iris close off the yard; a dark car noses in at the left edge and a long bronze sedan occupies the lower right, cut by the frame at the boot. Beyond the corner of the house another window burns yellow. The road in front is empty.

The trees were not moved and the cars were not arranged, and the picture is better for it. Hido worked here in 1998 with the camera on the far side of the street, holding the shutter open until the moonlight separated the clapboard from the dark. What the long exposure buys is not drama but description: the exact grey of painted wood at night, the exact tangle of a fence nobody has mended.

A photograph of this kind is often praised for what it implies, which is usually a mistake. The two lit windows tell us that the house is occupied and nothing else. We are not going to learn who parked the bronze car, or why the iris was left to grow through the wire, or what the curtain is for. The camera was pointed at a house and it described a house. Everything a viewer adds beyond that belongs to the viewer, and the picture is under no obligation to confirm it.