He crisscrosses the country in a rented car, creeping down suburban streets looking for a mood, cinematic and slightly surreal, the moment suspended in time when the evening air comes to life.

Todd Hido's photographs capture the emotional ether that gathers in the air like dewy fog. The atmospheric intensity has a painterly glow; light emanates from inside houses, hovers over grassy yards, sharpening the picket fences. A streetlight becomes a spotlight, the klieg of childhood, summoning you back to the place where memory and imagination intersect. "There's a delicious melancholic loneliness in his work that's sometimes like an Updike novel and sometimes reminiscent of In Cold Blood—very American," says art dealer Paul Morris. This fall an exhibition of Hido's landscape work opens at New York's Paul Moms Gallery. A new book of his work, Outskirts, with an essay by Luc Santo, has just been published by Nazraeli Press. And Hido's also got a show this summer at the Cleveland Museum of Art. "The night has been my studio," Hido, 34, says from his home in San Francisco. "It's a time when I can focus, the phone doesn't ring, nobody asks for anything. I've always been someone who stayed up late, even as a kid."