Todd Hido American, b. 1968

In the blue hush of dusk a small mobile home glows from within, its windows warm and gold against the cold dark, a single tall conifer rising behind it like a sentinel. Todd Hido made 2810 in 2001, and it is among the most tender of his suburban nocturnes, a humble dwelling lit up like a lantern at the lonely edge of evening.

Hido works in the last blue light and the dark beyond it, using long exposures and only the illumination already in the scene, streetlamps, porch bulbs, the leak of a curtained room. Here the palette is his coldest and most beautiful, deep teal sky against the amber of the windows, and that single contrast carries all the feeling, warmth held safe inside, isolation pressing in from every side. The trailer becomes a small ark of human presence in a vast, indifferent dusk, the spire of the fir tree standing guard over it like something out of a fairy tale gone quiet and sad. Light spills from the windows onto the clipped grass and the flank of a parked car, almost the only sign that anyone is still awake in the whole sleeping street.

These homes stand in for the Ohio of his childhood, surrogates for landscapes that live mostly in memory, charged with the loneliness of American life and the cinematic unease he shares with Edward Hopper and the films of David Lynch. Hido is among the most collected photographers of his generation, his work held in the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This blue nocturne is his art at its most affecting, a single lit home that makes the whole surrounding night ache.