Todd Hido
On monday we began discussing our impressions of Todd Hido's visit.
I believe one of the reasons I cannot really relate to his photographs of the houses is because I do not share the experience of growing up in the suburbs. I like that his work is an expression of the seriality of these places that have been fabricated, but at the same time this characteristic is disturbing to me as a person interested in urbanism. I look at these photographs and think of the places they depict as an example of a way in which the interaction among people has been affected by their built environment...This reminded me of a reading we did for Lou's class, Marina LaPalma's Situationism: A Primer, and the response I wrote for it. (I don't know if I'm going off on a tangent, but this is the way in which I look at these images. We bring our culture and personal positions into both, the way we make, and the way we look at images.)
This is what I wrote:
One sphere of our world where everyday the Spectacle lives, without it being questioned, is in the “factory towns” that LaPalma mentions. We continue building places for a population disregarding how they will or should be used. As a person interested in Architecture and Urbanism, I believe this is the most serious form the Spectacle takes, because it enables other segments of the Spectacle to subsist. We live in places where communities are invisible, and our housing and planning problems are only addressed at surface level by the controlling powers.
We are content with having a roof and four walls for a person, but this does not constitute a home. We present a “glossy façade” of beautifully gardened lawns, but do not care for establishing a community that helps the individual advance, thus giving the Spectacle greater force, allowing it to rule over a fragmented people. Places around the world are beginning to all look the same, because the individual’s identity and culture (not mass culture) have been lost.
In regards to the nude portraits, I think that I felt uneasy looking at them, because I imagined myself as these women, and thought that I was left powerless when confronting the lens. The way in which some of the women looked at the camera, the way some of them are against a wall or a corner are what caused me to react this way.



To end on a lighter note:
Recently watched film: Horton Hears a Who!