The Dead Are Glad to Be Remembered by Todd Hido

At the crossroads between an artist’s book and a scrapbook, The Dead Are Glad to Be Remembered — a bilingual English and French edition, signed and numbered in a limited run of 500 copies — invites readers to wander through Todd Hido’s work in dialogue with his collection of vernacular photographs. Each page opens onto a new, gently unfolding narrative shaped by Hido, in collaboration with his wife Marina Luz, and intentionally left open to interpretation.

The book gathers a selection of Hido’s portraits, house views, and landscapes — both unpublished and iconic — interwoven with postcards, book covers, vintage film posters, old amateur portraits, drawings, photo-booth strips, and more. The vernacular images are reproduced with all their material presence. Genres overlap and intermingle, creating a singular work that moves through shifting atmospheres of desire, solitude, memory, the unconscious, and the subconscious — themes that run throughout Hido’s practice. These resonate as well in the central essay by author Brad Zellar, who explores them through fragments of stories, lived experiences, and literary quotations.

A tribute to the printed image and to the memory of those who came before us, this edition echoes the intimacy of traditional photo albums, presented as a screw-bound volume with a canvas cover. The dialogue between the tactile qualities of the images and the variety of papers, including a translucent one, creates a quiet cinematic rhythm within the book, where photographs appear and fade like enigmatic collages. Arranged in an intentionally loose manner, they speak to one another and invite readers to craft their own pathways and narratives as they move through the album.