Todd Hido American, b. 1968

Fog presses against a darkened house, and a single barred window burns an unearthly green, the only warmth in a drowned, sodium-stained night. Todd Hido made 2904 in 2001, and like all his nocturnes it turns an ordinary suburban facade into something closer to a film still than a document, a place at once utterly familiar and quietly menacing.

Hido works after dark with long exposures and only the light that is already there, streetlamps, porch bulbs, the leak of a curtained room. He has described his method as shooting like a documentarian but printing like a painter, and here the fog does half the work, softening the house into a held breath while the barred green window glows like a guarded secret. The wrought-iron grille over the glass adds a faint unease, a hint of something protected or shut in. Someone is home, the picture insists, and at the same time leaves us stranded outside on the wet grass, looking in from the cold. The damp lawn in the foreground, lit a sickly green, offers no path toward the door, only a place to stand and stare, shut out by the very fog that makes the house so strange and beautiful.

These houses stand in for the Ohio of his childhood, surrogates for landscapes that live mostly in memory, charged with the loneliness of American suburbia and the dread of a thriller's opening frame. 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, and his monographs have shaped a whole school of atmospheric color. This foggy nocturne is his vision distilled, absence made to ache in a single lit window.