Published in 2015 by Galerie Alex Daniels – Reflex Amsterdam, *Khrystyna’s World* brings together Todd Hido’s photographs of a single model who appears as many different women. Khrystyna can be innocent or menacing, vulnerable or self-possessed, glamorous or deliberately unsettling. Her transformations give the book its central tension: identity is not presented as fixed, but as something performed, tested, and remade before the camera.

The project occupies a deliberately fictional terrain. Hido places his subject within seductive environments resembling film sets, cinematic locations, or fragments of film noir, using costumes and props to evoke an idealized post-war America. Yet the pictures do not simply treat Khrystyna as a vehicle for styling. The source material emphasizes her expressive agency: she is willing to become unattractive when the image requires it, to disturb the viewer, and to communicate the emotional atmosphere of each constructed scene. The resulting characters carry both vulnerability and threat, irony and gravity.

That sustained collaboration distinguishes the book within Hido’s practice. He had not previously worked so consistently with one model; through Khrystyna, he found not one muse but an expanding cast of characters, times, and places. The photographs move between implied narratives without fixing them to a single chronology or geography. Familiarity is therefore unstable: a scene may recall a film, a memory, or something a viewer would rather not recover.

At 64 pages, this English-language hardcover is a concentrated record of a partnership built around transformation and atmosphere. Its significance for collectors lies in the clarity of its premise and the coherence of its world: a tightly bounded photographic sequence in which the external setting becomes a reflection of an interior one. The closing image, a woman turned away in a field of black and touched by sunlight, leaves that world suspended between character and self.