Todd Hido American, b. 1968

A stand of bare trees at night, lit hard from the front. The trunks come up pale and silver, bark peeling in strips, dead branches curling off them at odd angles, and behind them the wood goes to solid black within a few metres. In front, dry grass fills the bottom third, straw-gold where the light reaches and gone at the edges. The only sky is a wedge of deep teal at the top left. Nothing moves.

The light is the giveaway. It comes from where the camera is, flat and slightly too strong, and it stops dead at a certain distance, which is what a car's headlights do on a dirt track. Everything the beam reaches is described in detail. Everything past it does not exist. The photograph has a hard back wall about ten metres in, and the wall is made of nothing at all.

Hido has driven at night for thirty years and his subject has quietly shifted from houses to whatever the lights happen to land on. There is no incident here, no window, nobody home. What there is instead is a wood that has been briefly and violently described by a passing vehicle and will go back to being invisible the moment it moves on. The trees look like they are standing up for an inspection they did not ask for.