Todd Hido

“For over 25 years, Todd Hido has crafted narratives through loose and mysterious suburban scenes, desolate landscapes, and cinematic portraits. Irrespective of its title, this is a book about hope and beauty and why we seek it so desperately at this time. For his latest images he has roamed as far as the Hawaiian Islands and their meteorological opposites; the shores of the Bering Sea, and Nordic fjords above the Arctic Circle. Even with such geographic diversity, Hido captures places that feel at once familiar and unknown; welcoming and unsettling. With this stunning new monograph, Hido picks up where his previous title Bright Black World left off, presenting some eighty new and previously unpublished landscape photographs. The End Sends Advance Warning is beautifully printed on heavyweight art paper and bound in offset printed linen. The book also includes nine tipped-in photographs printed on Kasadaka art paper, as well as tipped-in and laid-in booklets. A masterpiece of an artist’s book, and a must for the serious contemporary art library.”

Mark Steinmetz

“In the summer of 1987, I was 26 years old, a couple years out of graduate school, and living in a derelict apartment outside of Boston. I had received an artist’s residency in the South of France, and so, in August, I flew to Paris. I stayed a few weeks with close family friends in a top floor apartment on the Avenue de Wagram. My friends were working in fashion and film, and I was told my bed had once belonged to Jane Fonda before she became Barbarella. The weather was getting colder, and they gave me a brown corduroy jacket to wear that Jean Seberg (Godard’s Breathless, Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse) had cried on. I would eat some breakfast and run around Paris photographing all day—hardly eating because I had no money—returning to their apartment for dinner and a glass of champagne.

“Later in the year, I went to the South to begin my artist’s residency at the Camargo Foundation, in Cassis, a town on the sea not far from Marseille. The writer Virginia Woolf, the pointillist Paul Signac, the fauvists André Derain and Raoul Dufy, and the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, had spent extended periods of time in Cassis. I took day trips from Cassis to Arles, Aix, Marseille, and Nice, and could process my film in the simple darkroom that was supplied to me.

“In 1987, there were no cell phones or digital cameras. To meet up with someone you had to set a time and a place and each of you had to stick to the plan. The seasons seemed to linger around more, and in general, everyone seemed to have more time. The parks, museums, and subways were less crowded. The rhythm of daily life was more relaxed. People were worried in 1987, but not as worried as we are now.” – From the Introduction by Mark Steinmetz

This wonderful collection of previously unpublished photographs by Mark Steinmetz, made some thirty-five years ago during an extended stay in the South of France, provides welcome insight into his earliest years as a working artist. It comprises over sixty photographs beautifully printed in duotone on Japanese Kasadaka art paper, and bound in Burgundy linen. Limited to only one thousand case-bound copies, France 1987 will sell out quickly.