Todd Hido American, b. 1968

A low sun burns through fog at the upper left, a dull gold disc with no heat in it. In front of it, thin bare saplings; behind, more of them, going grey with distance. Mist lies across the middle of the picture at about waist height. The foreground is a tangle of dead grass, a fallen limb stripped pale, broken branches lying where they came down. Dark evergreens close the right edge. Everything is olive and brown and grey.

Nothing here has been cleared. The wood has been left to do what a wood does when nobody manages it, and Hido has photographed the mess at the exact hour that flatters it. The fog does the rest, sorting the scrub into planes by distance so that one thicket becomes three or four separate greys stacked one behind another, none of them attached to a ground you can stand on.

It looks like the end of something, which is the reaction it is built to get, and that is worth resisting a little. There is no catastrophe in this frame. It is a damp morning in a second-growth wood with the sun coming up, and the branches on the ground came down in an ordinary wind. What does the work is a low camera, a long lens and the decision to shoot straight into the light: three plain choices that between them will make any patch of scrub on earth look like the last one.