Todd Hido American, b. 1968

The footprints are the first thing I notice and then I can't stop noticing them. They come in from the bottom edge and mill about in front of the door, so somebody was out here on the snow in the dark, and given how the light falls — from close in, low, the way a headlamp falls — that somebody was Hido, standing in the cold, waiting out an exposure. What he was pointing it at is a building repaired so many times it has stopped being one thing. Boards run horizontal where they held and vertical where they didn't, pale grey against a warm reddish flank, and at the ridge the roof has simply opened, with a sheet of plastic stretched across the gap, now the brightest surface in the frame.

Ruin is the wrong word for it. Ruins are abandoned; this has been argued with. Every mismatched plank is somebody's afternoon, and the arguments went on long enough that the patches have themselves weathered into the wall. Around it the land gives nothing away — flat snow, dark hills, a white ridge off to the right — and the sky is that even mauve you only get when the night is being lit rather than photographed. A small green box sits in the snow, a post, a scatter of fallen timber nobody came back for.

I keep wanting to know whether the plastic went up last winter or ten winters ago, exactly what the picture won't say, and I suspect Hido likes it that way. He has spent decades photographing houses at night — lit from inside, somebody presumably in there watching television — and here he is in front of the opposite case, in a landscape with no trees and no neighbours: all the light on the outside, nobody home, the building holding its shape out of what looks like sheer habit. The footprints leave again. That is the part I find hard to get past.