Since its creation in 2007, Getxophoto‘s identity has been to create a platform for addressing current issues through artistic proposals, creating a collective moment of reflection and conversation. As every year, the event brings together the exhibitions under a theme, with variable interpretations. After PAUSE and PLAY, REC has been chosen this year, under the leadership of María Ptqr, who is making the programe for the third time.
Among the twenty or so invited artists of all nationalities, one stands out with a series of photographs as bizarre as they are comical, even absurd. The American John Divola (born in Los Angeles in 1949). A teacher since 1975, he has received several artist grants and has been the subject of numerous exhibitions; in France, at the Fondation Cartier and the Rencontres d’Arles, but also in the USA, Mexico, Japan, Australia, etc. Three Californian museums even simultaneously dedicated a retrospective to him in 2013.
Exhibited in Arles 20 years ago, Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert (1995-98) depicts a succession of dogs chasing the photographer’s vehicle. In a perfect example of serendipity, it was in the Morongo Valley desert, while he was on his way to shoot his Isolated houses, that he encountered these unwelcoming natives. He decided to immortalize them using a preset, motorized camera. These images, taken on the fly through his car window, in a radical black and white and full of grain, can first make us smile and then inspire all sorts of reflection. Should we continue the metaphor of the animal versus man? The wild and the modern? The dog’s doomed attempt at the car, and the camera trying to capture reality? – one of the images brings together an entire film taken of a single animal, without much success in framing – and all this in the middle of the desert, the place where “nothing is supposed to happen.” An opportunity to question the driver about his entire work.
Jean-Jacques Ader: “Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert” is quite different from your usual work—more static and devoid of human presence. Was it the sudden movement (of life) that interested you?
John Divola: The specific and the abstract. The observed object and the observer are both in dynamic relative positions.
JJA: Are you interested in the content of an image or what the image does with that content?
JD: If you photograph a cow’s head, people will look at it and think “cow” with all the associations we have with that context (cheese, pastoral life, etc.). Yet it’s a particular cow, at a specific time and place, in a specific context, both material and ephemeral. It’s the tension between these states that interests me.
JJA: Some of your older series are quite painterly—Cones, Moon, even Zuma—why not express yourself through drawing or painting?
JD: I’m a photographer. I know how to paint, draw, and play with the camera, and these activities have earned me a certain recognition. I can make an interesting photo out of an uninteresting drawing. Initially, I thought everything ended up becoming a photograph anyway.
JJA: You said, “The photograph as an object has a relationship to what it represents, much like a snake’s skin has a relationship to the snake that sheds it.” Can you tell us more?
JD: A photograph is a tangible (industrial) representation of human experience, action, and desire.
JJA: Is every photograph a fiction?
JD: Yes and no.
JJA: You’ve photographed abandoned places or destroyed buildings. Is this to show the end of things or their renewal? Or something else?
JD: I like the fact that it’s a competition that records and represents a history of gestures (including my own). It’s an unregulated social context in the midst of entropy, generally marked by both the melancholy of loss and change.
JJA: Finally, what should we see in your images?
JD: The result of an engagement at a specific time and place.
Jean-Jacques Ader
Getxophoto Festival “REC” in Getxo (Biscay, Spain) from May 29 to June 22, 2025, in various locations throughout the city and in public spaces.
Information: https://www.getxophoto.com/en/2025-edition/artists/
Forthcoming: John Divola, The X-Files, Skinnerboox, “Sheila,” published by TBW Books.
