Photography Gone to the Dogs

John Divola’s photographs of the Southern California desert in the late 1990s get a second wind thanks to Nazraeli Press’s reissues.

By Andrew WittMarch 8, 2026

• Art & Architecture

THERE IS A CERTAIN photographic situation that exists only because someone keeps moving. Walking can produce it. Driving can as well. It arises from a compulsion to encounter life as it comes hurtling at you, to keep going until an image either reveals itself or doesn’t. Both walking and driving depend on contingencies the photographer cannot always control: shifting light, uneven terrain, people or animals that wander in and out of the frame. If an image arrives, if it arrives at all, it is shaped by these aleatory encounters, the camera taking in the world as it is, delineating the limits of what can be seen and held within the frame. What is pictured cannot be separated from an unshakable desire to continue, from the insistence on moving through the world with a camera in hand, moment to moment.

John Divola’s photo book Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert (originally published in 2004) comprises a series made in 1996 while driving through Southern California. There is little mystery to the procedure aside from this desire to keep going. Divola drove through the desert and dogs gave chase. The dogs appear mid-stride, mouths open, teeth visible, their dusty bodies pitched forward in full extension, stretched out by motion. Shot with his Canon F-1, with a motor drive and high-speed 35 mm black-and-white film, Divola’s photographs are blurry and off-kilter, as if the camera were catching them not quite fast enough, or just a fraction too late. The camera remains inside the vehicle, angled downward, its focus and exposure set in advance, operated with one hand while the other stays on the steering wheel. The dogs run at, alongside, or ahead of the car. To make these images, Divola simply kept driving.

At first blush, one could read the dogs in Divola’s series as aggressive, and some of them are, unmistakably so, especially the image where one dog charges straight at the lens with its rabid eyes and bared teeth. But as the sequence builds, that first impression loosens. Other images carry an unusual grace, as if the dogs were discovering their own velocity in real time, surprised by the fact that their tired legs can still do this. You start to imagine them lying in the shade all afternoon, heat pooling around them, half asleep, until the sudden arrival of Divola’s car jolts them awake, shadows torn loose from the dirt floor, dark shapes briefly gaining reason to give chase.

There is something meta-photographic simply in the look of these images, as though Divola has arrived, almost accidentally, at a study of motion that recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s early motion sequences shot in the late 1870s at Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm. The dogs appear caught at unrepeatable instants: legs extended too far, paws splayed outwards, bodies screeching forward in ways the eye can never quite register in real time. Like Muybridge’s horse, the photographs are shadowy fragments, each frame isolating a position that exists only for a fraction of a second. What the camera is able to channel is this fact of motion in a raw and feral state.

Divola has reprinted Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert with Nazraeli Press, sending the project back into circulation as if it had merely been idling all this time. Photographs from the series are also currently on view at the International Center of Photography’s exhibition Hard Copy New York in three separate nine-foot-wide grids of cheap photocopies on ordinary white paper. The entire show comprises photocopies, the most provisional of media, and this may be the form in which Divola’s project feels most at home. Its grainy and streaked images seem to have been waiting for translation into disposable photocopies all this time. As ICP co-curator David Campany has observed, the low-grade format makes newly tangible both the “expanse of the bleak and mildly existential landscapes” and the “crazed vectors of car, camera, and dog pulling in different directions.”

Other images in Hard Copy seem to arrive under a similar impetus of haste and provisionality: Ari Marcopoulos’s photograph of a graffiti tag reading “Abolish ICE”; Jerry Hsu’s oblique image of the words “Getty Images,” caught at an angle and partially blocked by a chain-link fence. These are photographs that appear to have been made quickly, in split-second moments of awareness, taken because they might not be possible later. The photocopied format matches their speed, carrying them back into circulation with the same immediacy with which they were made. By contrast, Takashi Homma’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, with its tectonic monumentality, undergoes a material shift as it takes on this faded quality, its refinement undercut by its hasty reproduction. These are images printed as if to keep up with the moment of their aesthetic and political force, circulated with just enough clarity to remain legible before moving on.

Against a prevailing doxa that insists that contemporary photography must remain sleek and clean, the exhibition affirms the value in a hurried and unvarnished roughness, a sensibility with a long critical history. Janet Malcolm, in one of my favorite descriptions in the history of photography, once characterized Robert Frank’s photographs as so distracted and devil-may-care that they appeared “as if a kid had taken them while eating a Popsicle and then had had them developed and printed at the drugstore.”

By Divola’s own account, the images for Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert were something of an afterthought, produced during repeated trips into the desert while he was working on another project, Isolated Houses (1995–98), originally published by Nazraeli Press in 2000 and now reprinted for its 25th anniversary. Produced at the same time and in the same locations, the two bodies of work share little in terms of look and approach.

Isolated Houses, shot in color with a medium-format Hasselblad, turns its attention to small dwellings scattered across the desert. These are structures of minimal comfort, often photographed against heavily saturated skies at sunrise or sunset. Each house is centered in the frame, observed at a remove. At this scale, the houses begin to resemble small Donald Judd boxes. Little seems to happen in these images beyond the accumulation of light in the sky, offset by the vernacular Home Depot palette of the painted walls. The stability of the scene depends on distance. Move closer and the balance may give way. You might be asked to leave. You might encounter a dog.

Taken together, the two projects read as mutually contingent, dependent on one another in ways that make them twins—not identical but sharing photographic DNA. If Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert is driven by a breathless pursuit, Isolated Houses stands back, exchanging the desert’s grain for clean and crisp stillness. Yet both depend on the camera keeping just far enough away from the subject for the image to remain intact. In one, proximity is managed through speed, the photographer carried forward by the car and the dog’s momentum. In the other, distance is carefully calibrated to maximize the coloristic effects of the sky. And like a Möbius strip, the works turn back on themselves, the terms looping in and out of phase, a structure made visible in the design of the books, where each volume’s front and end papers are illustrated by the opposite project. The landscape the dogs run through appears in breadth and color in Isolated Houses, and the frantic momentum of the dog charging the car is implied here too, by the need to keep moving, to chase that sunset.

Before beginning his two desert projects, Divola had been circling what he later described as “[exhausted] iconographies of the sublime.” The phrase suggests both a weariness with inherited visual tropes and an unwillingness to abandon them altogether. A series completed in the early 1990s, Four Landscapes, consisted of grainy black-and-white photographs structured around Southern California’s four distinct terrains: mountains, desert, city, and sea. Figures appear sporadically in these images, edging toward the margins or straying out of frame. The work treats the human figure as a kind of punctuation mark in a landscape that is indifferent, if not actively hostile, to the figure’s presence.

This was not Divola’s first foray into the rhetoric of the sublime, nor the photographic ruin, nor their depleted codes. His most recognized and frequently reproduced work, Zuma (1977–78), centers on an abandoned building on Zuma Beach, which he entered and photographed repeatedly over the course of a year. The structure wasn’t remote or inaccessible. It sat in plain view on the county beach in Malibu, its status as a ruin contingent rather than settled: the local fire department was using it as a staging ground to put out controlled fires. Divola’s interventions are eccentric both in gesture and in application: spray-painted whorls and lines worked directly onto the walls, the camera’s flash deployed at dawn and dusk to punch light into the interior and ricochet it back through windows, producing a strange coloristic effect. The result treats the destroyed interior as a provisional site of chromatic psychedelia. Many of the photographs in Zuma carry, improbably, the flatness and even the look of a Matisse painting, while remaining resolutely photographic.

A lesser-known project from the same period, photographed on the MGM backlot in Culver City, was made just as the site was slated for demolition after the studio deemed it unprofitable. The streets and buildings of the backlot, which was now in the process of being dismantled, were sets constructed to resemble the facades of a bankrupted 1970s New York but which had been used mostly for postapocalyptic films set in the near future. The ruin is farcical, twice removed from its referent, its structures undercut by the ease with which they are disassembled. With the site open due to nearby real estate development, Divola simply drove in and photographed it in a straight documentary mode.

Through all of these projects, it is possible to read Divola’s work as participating in the familiar myth of the heroic photographer venturing into places where he is not wanted. This reading has a certain explanatory usefulness: it accounts for the repeated acts of trespass, the willingness to risk confrontation with dogs or security guards. But it is also a reading that sums up the work too quickly. The images exert a strangeness, a pull, that is not easily explained away by questions of permission. Whatever moral accounting they invite, the images also outrun it.

We are left with one last question: why the desert? The desert has long been framed as a site of limit-experience, a place where rhetoric of the sublime comes easily to hand. Prehistoric rocks. Oddly shaped cacti. Unreal light. Otherworldly horizons. There is, of course, the familiar impulse to leave, to drive 150 miles out of Los Angeles and put a measurable distance between yourself and the city. One heads east, toward Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, Twentynine Palms, the infinite expanse of the Morongo Basin, Wonder Valley. At least initially, it was the latter that drew Divola. The desert offers all the clichés of an escape, a way of stripping vision back to its bare bones, pitting perception against scale and emptiness and, in the case of Dogs Chasing My Car, against animals that will serve as unknowing but enthusiastic collaborators. But these familiar tropes can obscure the fact that the desert is shaped by the same economic forces that structure the rest of the region.

That fact reminds us that the desert is a working landscape, no different from any other California terrain: structured by real estate speculation, marked by subdivisions that arrive too early, stall out, or are never completed. Other photographers have turned to the desert to photograph these conditions, from Anthony Hernandez’s Discarded (2016), produced amid the failed housing developments of the 2008 subprime mortgage crash, to Gregory Halpern’s psychedelic photo book ZZYZX (2016).

One should also not forget that military bases sit alongside these failed developments, as do infrastructures of weapons testing, whose presence is discreet yet palpable, especially to those who know where to look. Divola knows where to look. Over the past decade, he has repeatedly visited the former George Air Force Base—a Cold War installation outside Victorville that was decommissioned in the early 1990s—spending extended periods there, spray-painting its walls, making images.

Looking again at the photographs from Isolated Houses, there is nothing ironic or farcical about their citation of the photographic sublime or the ruin. The houses sit in the desert, small and intact, framed against the sky. One recognizes the familiar visual conventions of isolation and scale and may feel the reflex to read the images as metaphors for the frontier, or California, or some other limit condition, but that reflex quickly burns through its own fuel. The images do not ask to stand in for anything larger. They are the result of returning to the same terrain with a camera in hand and making photographs that seem to assume, from the outset, that there will be more.

The desert encourages this type of work. It is permissive in its indifference, so long as you’re willing to risk the occasional flat tire. One further detail should be added to this point: Divola’s photo book includes the exact coordinates of each site, an invitation for someone to visit, perhaps 25 years from now, to see what time has done. The impulse to return and make the same image of the same houses resembles the accumulation of photographs of sunsets on a phone, taken again and again, often under nearly the same sky, not because the view has changed in any meaningful way, but because the urge to make the image has not yet run its course. As we all know, most of those images are never looked at again. They pile up like digital sediment. They exist largely to make room for more images, and this is perhaps their secret.

That fact also points to something more philosophically expansive: the desert’s apparent inexhaustibility, and with it the inexhaustibility of the medium of photography to document this condition. The desert does not deplete itself through representation. It does not seem to register the fact of having been photographed at all, let alone photographed thousands of times from nearly identical vantage points, under marginally different skies, by different people who nevertheless arrive with the same expectations already half formed. It is as if the desert, in its vastness, throws the whole “image overload” argument into relief. Against the familiar claim that our culture is drowning in images—that there is simply too much photography now, especially online—the desert seems to advance a counterproposition that there is never enough.

Divola’s photographs channel something of this spirit. They are like conduits: each image carries within it the pressure of the next. They lead, almost inevitably, to further work. From Isolated Houses comes Dogs Chasing My Car, a procedural continuation, one way of working giving way to another. The relevance of the work lies in the fact that it keeps going. Images generate more images. Projects produce the conditions for their successors. The work forces a return, demands movement, requires raising the camera again and again, doing the hard labor of carrying on, moment to moment.

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Featured image: John Divola, from Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, 1996–98. Courtesy of the artist.