If I clearly remember my first encounter with Todd Hido’s House Hunting, my memory of Excerpts from Silver Meadows is more fragmented, confused, spotty. I clearly remember wanting a copy, and hunting for one for years, always put off by how expensive the out of print book is, despite first appearing in an edition of 3000 copies, but that was all well after the fact, well after actually learning of and seeing the work. Then, deep in the depths of the continuing pandemic, after receiving the third stimulus check, my tax return, and annual bonus all in the span of about 2 weeks, I pulled the trigger on the cheapest, most beat-up copy I could find. It wasn’t the most expensive book I impulse/anger/depression-bought in that period, but it’s probably the one I wanted the longest…

Outskirts is the sort of follow-up, companion book to House Hunting, featuring more apartment complexes and dead ends, and fewer homes than the earlier book, much like the outskirts of my hometown and probably yours too. As a good little Hido fanboy, I jumped on the 2021 edition without a second thought.

I came aware of Todd Hido’s House Hunting work probably close to 20 years ago. I remember seeing it in college, I think, or maybe grad school, but I wasn’t really too hip on ordering photobooks online back then, so when Nazraeli Press announced a third edition of the long-out-of-print and wildly-expensive-on-the-secondary-market classic, I jumped on it.

Jason Lee’s Galveston was a long time coming. I preordered as soon as I heard about it, within days of the announcement on the @filmphotographic Insta, if I recall, and it was delayed several times by the pandemic. It’s here now, and it’s pretty much everything I expected.