Artist: Todd Hido

Reflex Amsterdam presents 'An Island in the River of Time', a new exhibition by Todd Hido. Known for his atmospheric nocturnal scenes and psychologically charged portraits, Hido now turns toward the expanded visual form of collages and explores the shifting terrain between memory, place, and narrative.

An Island in the River of Time, evokes a momentary stillness within the continuous flow of experience, a pause in which fragments of past and present drift together and drift within the river. In these new works, Hido brings his own photographs into dialogue with vernacular and found imagery, constructing layered compositions that feel at once both intimate and anonymous, real and imagined.

“I love the process of laying out the sequence and juxtaposition of images. Sometimes I think half my photographic practice is just shuffling images around. Editing and sequencing images is one of my favorite things to do. It is like a puzzle with no correct answer, only different ones.”

This instinct for assembling meaning through juxtaposition, long present in Hido’s practice, finds new expression here. The collages dissolve the linear structure of time, allowing multiple moments to coexist within a single frame. Like islands in a moving current, these images resist chronology, instead floating freely within an emotional and psychological landscape, creating new narratives.

“We gather old photographs with no intent, but there are so many good ones that deserve to see the light of day again. We may not ever know the names of the people in the photographs or the stories behind them, but we can help them live on a little longer in our cultural memory. And isn’t that the goal of most vernacular photography?”

In this new body of work, Hido transforms photography’s documentary impulse into something more fluid, a meditation on time’s passage and the persistence of images that refuse to fade. His collages do not capture a moment; they let moments drift, merge, and resurface, like memory itself, within the unsteady river of time.