species we have remained physically unchanged for millennia. This accounts for the primal pull of Tichý’s images. But this biological imperative has been refined, recalibrated, mediated and – at times – challenged by the long history of art. Patched-up equipment notwithstanding, the ageing voyeur and former art student was conscious of the gestures catalogued by this tradition so that his pictures, at their best, have the delicacy and poise of a smutty Vermeer.
Or, to get to the quick of the matter, the indelicacy of a certain Courbet. In 1866, at the request of a Turkish diplomat, Courbet painted a tightly cropped close-up of a woman’s stomach and genitals called The Origin of the World. The first Tichý photographs on show at the Pompidou are, in representational terms, near-failures. In some you can make out the shape – elusive and suggestive as the constellations – of what may be a woman. Others are just blurs and protoplasms of light emerging from infinite darkness. If you were able to travel back to the dawn of time, as the universe writhed into existence, this, perhaps, is what you might see.
2008
It makes sense to talk about Todd Hido’s approach. Roaming shows roads taken and not taken, some peering back into the photographic past (right back, in fact, to the murky dawn of pictorialism), some blurring into obscurity, others hinting at visual possibilities that might lie ahead. House Hunting reveals where some of these roads lead, the homes at the end of the street. Occasionally Hido enters the premises and finds signs of discarded life: a stained mattress, a towel on the carpet. But never people. It’s as if something is missing from the title. All the vowels are present except the absent ‘a’, which lurks, unseen, tacitly between the ‘h’ and the ‘u’ of Hunting. This sense of the pictures being haunted by what is absent is integral to their effect.
These exteriors, with their brightly lit windows, are reminiscent – in a modern, democratic, American way – of the paintings of Victorian mansions at twilight by Atkinson Grimshaw. Grimshaw’s work depends on a paradox of domesticity: the best way to appreciate being inside is to imagine what it might seem like from the outside (that’s why people leave their curtains open). Step through the doorways of Hido’s photographs and any promise of cosiness is broken – as is much of the stuff we see lying around.
The relationship between a particular exterior (which serves as a kind of establishing shot) and a neighbouring interior is suggested but never verified. Instead of confirmation there are further doubts and, as often as not, more doors. The lines from Whitman, used as an epigraph to the catalogue of Walker Evans’ 1971 retrospective at MoMA, are hard to avoid: ‘I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have their exteriors, and that the eyesight has another eyesight …’
The inhabitants of the buildings are finally – if fictively – revealed in Between the Two. The threshold we have crossed appears physical but it is also a subtler one separating documentary record from psychological construct. The interior in which we find ourselves is the photographer’s head. Put it another way. Stepping inside Hido’s buildings is like finding a drawer, once stuffed full, now empty except for a photograph that got left behind when everything else was chucked out (a negative definition of editing, I guess). Inevitably, this photograph has about it the quality of a secret. Not just any secret but, specifically, of a sexual secret. What are the defining qualities of sexual secrets? That, with the odd variation – a preference for one shade or style of underwear – they are pretty much the same as everyone else’s. Another name for such universal secrets is the unconscious.
This is not to diminish the importance individuals attach to achieving their own peculiar ends. Wear this wig, Hido tells his models. Put these shoes on. Move your leg over that way. Approach an ideal I have in my mind. The photos that result simultaneously record both this ideal and a failed distance from it. The degree of contrivance required to realise this vision – i.e. to fall short in exactly the desired way – is considerable: the artificial nature of the set-up (hired models sort of acting like hookers, in the service not of sex but of art); location-scouting a hotel because it is redolent of nowhere in particular; high-end camera with a tripod, large negative and inconvenient exposure times. The pictures, let’s say, have to work overtime to achieve a heightened idea of the tawdry.
It was almost inevitable that Hido would take things a stage further (those signature images from Roaming, of telegraph poles receding into the uncertain distance, serve as a visual incitement to do just that, to keep going) and supplement the large-format, meditative images of Between the Two with pictures snatched with the kind of camera anyone could use, to replace the careful modulation of natural light with the unforgiving glare of the on-camera flash. (There are precedents for this kind of low-spec investigation: the most significant would be Evans using a Polaroid camera – or ‘toy’ as he first thought of it – to make thousands of pictures in the last years of his life.) The results are like accidents that couldn’t wait to happen.
The scenario is so familiar, from both the point of view of the women (the models) and the men (the photographers) as to be almost archetypal. The narrator of Lorrie Moore’s novel Anagrams recalls a number of episodes that could double as captions for pictures like these: ‘Three times before, my husband had asked me to pose with various articles of clothing removed. Once in the bedroom wearing only boots and one of his ties. Once in the bathroom with a red towel draped strategically to miss one breast. Once in the kitchen in just my bra. And today. I did this because I loved him, I supposed, but maybe I did it because I’d grown up in a trailer and guessed that this is what people did in houses, that this is what houses were for’ (italic added).
As far as the men are concerned, the idea is to make your girlfriend or wife look like herself and someone else, to fulfil, simultaneously, what a character in Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls famously reckons are two of men’s basic needs: ‘pussy and strange pussy’. The sudden lurch of the flash accomplishes this but, in doing so, it leaves the women stranded – and not just between their actual and assumed identities. Diane Arbus observed a similar tension when she was photographing beauty queens in the early 1960s. What intrigued Arbus was the way that the girls ‘continually made the fatal mistakes which were in fact themselves’.
Like the gear worn by Hido’s models, that word ‘fatal’ is fitting and revealing. For there is something quite creepy and pervy about these beautiful pictures. There is the haunting sense that this is the last photo of X or Y before she disappeared. Now, something like that has always been latent in the very idea of the photograph (Barthes’ ‘the return of the dead’). If it is felt particularly acutely here that is partly because Hido is using an old-fashioned camera requiring obsolete film (he has a stash) so that there is a discrepancy between when the pictures were taken and – certain technologies being indelibly associated with certain periods – what or, more precisely, when they look like. Hence there is another dimension to the way in which the women are stranded: not just between identities (real and constructed) and between places (the whereabouts of the interiors being uncorroborated by exteriors) but in time.
All things considered, it is no wonder that these women appear so vulnerable. The camera poses the question it is incapable of answering. More exactly, because of the old film stock, it asks the same question in two slightly different tenses: What has become of them? What is to become of them?
Historically, women have been encouraged to become whatever men have wanted them to be. But even those most at pains to devote themselves entirely to the demands of self-effacement retain something of what they are and have been since they were kids – even if (and again it was Arbus who saw this clearly) that thing, that saving grace, is a flaw. Contradicting the suspicion that these might be images of the disappeared, this reinforces the inkling – itself consistent with the earlier feeling that a given picture somehow
