I had an experience I learned a lot from in the ’60s, on my first extended stay in Europe. All I knew about what was happening in America was what I would read in The Herald Tribune. It seemed like the country was falling apart. And that’s because newspapers don’t report that the Hudson River was flowing today and the laws of gravity were still in place. But pictures remind us that life does go on, and that there are spring snow storms, for better or for worse.

Todd Hido

All of a sudden my work became topical when people started to deal with the effects of isolation and having to stay home. I’ve always thought that my pictures are very much open for interpretation and I’ve always tried to instill a little bit of ambiguity in what I do. I was super surprised when I made a post the first day that the lockdown happened in California, and people really took to it. It’s kind of a perfect example of the flexibility of the meaning of images.