Setting out to ‘photograph what exists and prevails in modern America’, Todd Hido’s acclaimed series A Road Divided presents an American landscape devoid of people but not of human intervention, in the form of roads, houses and telephone poles, glimpsed through the car window. His evocative landscapes allow the viewers to feel what they see. Hido describes the present photograph, taken in eastern Washington, an area reminiscent of his childhood landscape in the farmlands of Ohio, as ‘one of those rare but actual magic moments that occur infrequently in the life of a photographer’. While shooting a tree previously struck by lightning, Hido caught the light as it shifted from dense fog to full sun. He selected this beautiful and sublime image for the cover of his 2010 monograph A Road Divided.

Hido’s work has been exhibited widely and is held in many collections, including the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. Other prints of the present work reside in the collection of Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco and the Sir Elton John Collection, Atlanta/London.