Todd Hido is a contemporary photographer distinguished by a very personal style, which has certainly contributed to consolidating a visual code even on social networks. House Hunting is his project entirely realized driving at night along the West Coast that captures and collects houses of different neighborhoods. The amazing evocative atmosphere and the management of light, strengthened by the common element of the windows with the light that is present in every home, give the whole project a very precise identity. As the artist states:

“If you want to take a photo, you don’t knock on someone’s door to ask permission”.

The charm of housing leads him to an obsessive search for something, even if he cannot reveal exactly what he is looking for, it’s the path and not the goal that makes the development of his idea a visual document that represents what it was suburban America at that specific historical moment. The book, published in 2001, is strongly influenced by artist’s adolescence in Kent, in Ohio, that in the 70s was a theatre of shootings on university students by the national guard of the army, during a protest against Vietnam war.

Todd says that probably the real reason why he wants to photograph houses at night is the families that live there:

“I wonder about how people live, and the act of taking that photograph is a meditation”.

Photography proves to answer with a slightly voyeuristic mood that meditates on what the word privacy really means. In the book, now a classic of contemporary photography, there are 26 photographs carefully selected by the artist, which in 2002 were accompanied by another correlate book, Outskirts.