Todd Hido American, b. 1968

A narrow street of clapboard houses under snow, photographed through a windscreen that has not been cleared. The glass is wet and fogged, so the bottom quarter of the picture smears into a wash of white and the edges lose their grip entirely. Houses crowd both sides: porches, storm windows, a snow-loaded roof, a bare tree hard against the left edge. The road runs straight away from us between them and stops at a flat pale nothing, sky and frozen water meeting with no line between them. Somewhere down there, a small dark figure.

This is Hido photographing from the car, which is where most of his work has been made, and the windscreen is doing the job a filter or a soft lens would do for anybody else. The dirt on the glass is real dirt. The blur at the bottom is real slush thrown up by a wiper. He has kept the whole apparatus of looking through a car at somebody else's street in the middle of winter, including the parts that get in the way.

What the weather does is take away the evidence. In a clearer picture you could read the state of the paint, the make of the car in the drive, whether anybody had shovelled. Here the houses are reduced to shape and tone and the street becomes any street, in any small town, on the kind of afternoon when nobody goes out. The single figure at the far end is the only thing moving. He is walking toward the water at the end of the road, and the photograph lets him go.