Todd Hido American, b. 1968

A pavement runs from the bottom of the frame into fog that is lit gold from somewhere ahead. On the left, a fence of grey boards leans and gapes, one plank hanging loose across the others, with a low tree spreading over it. On the right, the front half of an old pickup sits at the kerb, its windscreen catching the light, one headlamp visible. Beyond it everything dissolves: a further fence, a pale shape that might be a wall, and then nothing at all.

Fog is the honest collaborator, because it does openly what photography does in secret. It removes information, keeps the small amount it likes, and lets us supply the rest. Hido photographed this in 1999 without adding or moving anything, and the result looks staged, which should worry us. The scene has been composed by weather and a long exposure, and we read that composition as intention.

What I distrust is not the picture but our confidence before it. Everyone who looks at this will place something at the end of that street, and each of them will be certain. The photograph offers no evidence for any of it; it simply declines to contradict us. That is the whole mechanism, in one frame: an image tells us less than we think, we fill the deficit with our own material, and then we call the result reality and hang it on a wall.