The Dead Are Glad to Be Remembered [Signed]

Bilingual: English and French
Limited edition of 500 copies in a box set, numbered and signed.
Screw-bound album, 32 x 20 cm
144 pages
Around 100 photographs colour and B&W

At the crossroad of an artist's book and a scrapbook, The Dead Are Glad to Be Remembered, signed and numbered in a limited edition of 500 copies, invites us to explore Todd Hido's work in dialogue with his collection of vernacular photographs. Each page of the album offers a new narrative composed by Todd Hido, with the collaboration of his wife Marina Luz, deliberately left open-ended.

The book presents a selection of Todd Hido's portraits, urban house views, and landscapes, both unpublished and iconic, punctuated by postcards, book covers, vintage movie posters, old amateur portraits, drawings, photo booth pictures, and more. The vernacular photography is reproduced in all its materiality. Genres blend together to create a unique work that plays on different atmospheres around the themes of desire, loneliness, memory, the unconscious, and the subconscious, which are characteristic of the photographer's work. These themes are found in the essay by author Brad Zellar, at the heart of the book, which he explores through these fragments of experiences and stories interspersed with literary quotations.

Both an ode to the printed image and to the memory of those who have lived, this limited edition echoes traditional photo albums with its screw-bound canvas cover. The dialogue between the materiality of the images and the different types of paper, including one that is translucent, creates a cinematic fiction within the book, with certain photographs appearing and disappearing like enigmatic collages. These images, arranged randomly on the page, respond to one another and allow the reader to create their own narratives.