Todd Hido American, b. 1968

A stand of bare trees at night, lit from behind and below by something bright and warm that is not in the picture. The light comes up through the branches and turns them gold, and the fog carries it out sideways into a sky the colour of wet charcoal. In front of the trees, a ploughed road: tyre tracks, a broken ridge of dirty snow pushed up along both sides, clods scattered across the surface where the blade threw them.

The upper half of this photograph looks like an annunciation and the lower half looks like Tuesday. Whatever is making that light is a farm lamp, or a truck, or a house behind the trees, and it does not matter which, because the fog does not care what it is amplifying. The atmosphere here is a machine for turning any light source at all into an event.

Hido has been photographing at night from a car for a long time and he knows exactly how cheap the effect is and uses it anyway. The honest part is the road. He has not cropped out the ploughed snow or the tyre tracks, which would have left a mystery, and instead has kept the evidence that somebody drives here every day and clears this in the dark so that the day can happen. The glory is free. The road took work.