Todd Hido: Intimate Distance

An expanded chronology charting Todd Hido’s career, with ten years of new work.

Well known for his photography of landscapes and suburban housing, and for his use of detail and luminous color, acclaimed American photographer Todd Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all that he photographs, digging deep into his memory and imagination for inspiration. Newly revised and expanded, Intimate Distance: Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album includes ten years of new work since the book’s first publication, including breathtaking new images from his travels to Iceland, Norway, and Japan, where he brings both a familiar eye and an expansive new vision. 

Though Hido has published many smaller monographs of individual bodies of work, this gathers his most iconic images, along with many unpublished works to provide the most complete and comprehensive monograph charting his career. The book is organized chronologically, showing how his series overlap in exciting ways. David Campany introduces the work and looks at the kind of cinematic spectatorship the work demands. And Katya Tylevich muses on the making of each of Hido’s major monographs, “The photographs lead as far as human-made roads go. They reach the periphery of utility wires, footprints, and paths already taken.” From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, from landscapes to nudes, from America and beyond, this midcareer collection reveals how his unique focus has developed and shifted over time, yet the tension between distance and intimacy remains.

Todd Hido (born in Kent, Ohio, 1968) is a San Francisco Bay Area–based artist whose work has been featured in Artforum, the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Elephant, Foam, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of over fifty museums, including the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has authored over a dozen books, including House Hunting (2001), Excerpts from Silver Meadows (2013), Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude (Aperture, 2014), and The End Sends Advance Warning (2024). Hido is also an avid photobook collector with a library of over 8,500 titles.

David Campany is one of the best-known and most accessible writers on photography. His books include On Photographs (2020), A Handful of Dust (2015), The Open Road (Aperture, 2014), Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (2013), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (2011), and Photography and Cinema (2008). His essays have appeared in numerous books, and he contributes regularly to Aperture, Frieze, Source, and Tate Etc. magazine. He is based in New York City.

Katya Tylevich is an arts and fiction writer. She is author of Marina Abramović: A Visual Biography (2023) and Gus Van Sant: The Art of Making Movies (2021), among others. She is a longtime collaborator with Todd Hido and a frequent contributor to publications such as Elephant, Mark, Frame, Domus, and Pin-Up. With her brother Alexei she cofounded Friend & Colleague, a platform for editions, fiction, and special projects. She is based in Los Angeles.