Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Medium: Photography
Website: toddhido.com
Todd Hido was born in 1968 in Kent, Ohio, and grew up in a suburban neighborhood surrounded by cornfields. He received a BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1991, and an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1996, where he was mentored by Larry Sultan — a formative relationship that has shaped his practice ever since. He is now an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
He is represented by Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York, Casemore Gallery in San Francisco, Rose Gallery in Santa Monica, Alex Daniels Reflex Gallery in Amsterdam, and Les Filles du Calvaire in Paris. His photographs are in the permanent collections of over fifty museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, LACMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Pier 24 Photography. He has published more than seventeen books, including House Hunting (Nazraeli, 2001), Excerpts from Silver Meadows (Nazraeli, 2013), Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude (Aperture, 2014), Bright Black World (Nazraeli, 2018), The End Sends Advance Warning (Nazraeli, 2023), and the expanded and revised Intimate Distance: Over Thirty Years of Photographs (Aperture, 2025). He is one of the subjects of Jason Momoa’s documentary series On The Roam, aired on HBO Max. His awards include the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Visual Arts Award, and the Barclay Simpson Award.
Hido works in color photography, making atmospheric images of anonymous suburban houses at night, desolate landscapes, dimly lit interiors, and melancholic figures that evoke a persistent sense of isolation, mystery, and cinematic anticipation. His photographs are not documentary — they are careful constructions, shot at night in rain and fog, often through the windshield of his car, at the thresholds between inside and outside, light and dark, presence and absence. Drawing deeply on childhood memories of suburban Ohio, he wanders endlessly, taking lengthy road trips in search of imagery that connects with his own recollections. He has named Alfred Hitchcock, Edward Hopper, Larry Sultan, Nan Goldin, and Rineke Dijkstra as key influences. His practice has evolved over thirty years from his early obsessive focus on the suburban house exterior, through intimate interior portraits, to his most recent work The End Sends Advance Warning, which photographs the landscapes of the Bay Area, Hawaii, the shores of the Bering Sea, and Nordic fjords above the Arctic Circle — a late-career turn toward hope, majesty, and environmental beauty persisting in troubled times. He is also an avid photobook collector with a library of over 8,500 titles.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.