While the many series John Divola made over his career may seem disparate and cover a variety of approaches, his photographs are consistently born in and of California. From quixotic images of 1970s Valley housewives watering their lawns, to performative work utilizing a fire-training depot at Zuma Beach as both site and studio, to the conceptually driven series Artificial Nature, which deploys existing movie-set still photography (i.e., stills, also known as continuity photography), Divola explores the states of California. In turn, his photographs remind us of California’s place in photographic history—as in the series Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, which evokes the mid-nineteenth-century studies of animals in motion by Eadweard Muybridge, commissioned by Leland Stanford (of Stanford University) and a precursor to motion-picture projection.
Divola’s series is both exhilarating and confounding, reflective of the battle between man and nature that is profoundly present in the West and in the California desert. In this image from the Morongo Valley, he captures a dog unable to resist the challenge posed by his car. As a classic California protagonist, it represents the freedom the region espouses nationally. More philosophically, Divola has stated, “Here we have two vectors and velocities—that of a dog and that of a car—and seeing that a camera will never capture reality, and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of a devotion to a hopeless enterprise.”
Eve Schillo
2021