Continuing through September 13, 2026

Viewed through a rain-splattered windshield, the road ahead is swallowed by the dark woods that surround it. The trees’ twiggy crowns reach upward, precisely focused when they’re not visually smudged by the damp glass. Clouds clog the sky. Daylight is fading or just emerging. Todd Hido’s studio archival pigment print “#L 11794-0141” (2024) is both stunning and disquieting. What we know, or imagine, about a dark forest colors our response to the image. Like windows at night, Hido’s photographs reflect the viewer as much as the view.

In the late 1990s the Bay Area photographer began showing the improbably poetic pictures he was taking while driving around scruffy exurbs. “#L 1846″ (1996) fixes our attention on the ill-lit side of a cheap box building set at a distance. A curtained window is illuminated. The building partly blocks our view of a brighter row of houses, and, beyond that, the yellowish-gray glow of the urban sky. Closer to us sits a dirty van with 49ers graffiti. The slope between van and building is dark and illegible. Our eyes keep returning to that window, it curtain forming a boundary between the photographer as documentarian and voyeur.

The shoddy houses over which Hido’s camera lingers have peeling paint and unkempt surroundings. They swim in neon or sodium-vapor light when they’re not half-obscured by darkness. Inevitably, a light glows in some distant window. Hido cites Edward Hopper as an influence, and, as in Hopper’s scenes of alienation, the loneliness we envision inside is also our own.

Also like Hopper’s images, Hido’s can be haunting. “I photograph like a documentarian and print like a painter,” he asserts. Back in the analog era, that meant dodging and burning. Today, Hido relies on Lightroom software to shift colors, intensify or open up shadows, and otherwise enhance the hallucinatory potential of fog, snow, condensation, long exposures, occluded surfaces, and circles of confusion. Even his daylight interiors achieve such effects. “#L 12084-4048” (2022) frames a sterile corner in what looks like the living room of an unoccupied apartment. Sunlight radiates around the edges of a pulled-down shade and through a curtain, bathing the room in honeyed tones punctuated by patches of light.

“Many Small Decisions” marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Hido’s seminal monograph, “House Hunting” (2001, reprinted in 2019), yet the exhibition comprises later work almost exclusively. Collages and cinematic portraits of nubile women mingle with damp and desolate landscapes, some from locations as far-flung as the Bering Sea and Nordic fjords above the Arctic Circle.  The only image from “House Hunting” appears on the contact sheet reproduced as “#L 2690-CS905” (2000). Focused on a house and the time-worn fence around it, “#L 2690” invites comparisons to Paul Strand’s famous “White Fence,” his vision of suburban America in 1916.

Hido draws inspiration from his personal collection of over 9,000 photobooks. The show is rife with allusions to the work of other photographers and at least one painter, Gerhard Richter. “#L 8869” (2009), a back view of a nude woman absorbed in a book, evokes Richter’s depiction of his then-wife, “Lesende (Girl Reading)” (1994). Richter has often sourced his paintings in family photographs, which he sees as crutches for approaching reality. Hido’s “#L 8869” turns the tables, beginning with that reality, then painting, in photographic fashion, using color and light.

If Hido’s early work was about finding an uncanny allure in quotidian reality, his later work challenges us to interpret images that play with the traditional rules of realist photography. His jigsaw-like collages juxtapose found and vernacular images with small prints of Hido’s past artwork and decades-old snapshots. While our eyes hopscotch around in search of narratives and meanings, he lures us toward the cinematic. “#L8” combines a closeup of a watchful young woman with an apartment for rent notice, a sign reading “OHIO DR,” and a stage-lit black-and-white of a man wearing a wifebeater tee shirt and staring down at the camera. Hido’s widely acknowledged aesthetic kinships with Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch are fully in evidence. Both the gasping Elizabeth Taylor look-alike and the pouty blonde in “#L7” could figure among Cindy Sherman’s personas. Hido puts them next to reprints of a 1940s-style studio portrait, a naïf painting, a cat picture, a fabric or wallpaper sample, and a sign reading: “TO BE CONTINUED.” Skipping around time periods and aesthetic conventions, he implies meaningful relationships among them.

How much of what we are seeing reaches into Hido’s own past? How much is fantasy, dream, or illusion? As with the curtained windows, not knowing keeps us looking.