Todd Hido American, b. 1968

Six balloons, tied together and floating up into a pale green sky. Orange, two yellows, and a tan one hanging lowest, its skin catching a single soft highlight. The strings run down out of the bunch and off the bottom of the frame, so whoever is holding them is not in the picture. Along the left edge, a maple in full autumn colour fills a third of the square, red going to rust. More trees close the bottom right, one of them still green.

The colours are the joke and Hido will not point at it. The balloons have been made in a factory to be cheerful, and the maple has arrived at almost exactly the same range of oranges by dying. Nothing in the picture comments on this. The camera has simply been aimed upward at a bunch of party balloons on an afternoon in the fall, and the rhyme is left lying there for anyone who wants it.

Almost everything Hido is known for happens at night, through a windscreen, in the rain. This is the other half of him: colour film, daylight, a soft lens and a subject that could hardly be more ordinary. The balloons are for something. A birthday, a sale, a driveway. The photograph does not say which and does not need to, because the thing it caught was the half second when six pieces of cheap rubber were the brightest objects in a landscape that was already doing the same colours much better and much more slowly.