With the reissue of Dogs Chasing my Car in the Desert, Nazraeli Press revisits John Divola’s cult series (2004), in which a canine chase in the heart of the Californian desert becomes a gesture at once absurd and deeply existential.
In the late 1990s, John Divola ventured into the deserts of Southern California for what would become his Isolated Houses series (2000). He explored the Morongo Valley in search of its Jackrabbit Homesteads, small cabins that multiplied across the desert following the Small Tract Act of 1938. For Divola, the desert is a total experience: visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory. It is also an empty space that confronts us with our own presence, taking on a profoundly existential dimension.
During these excursions, his car was often chased by dogs. Emerging in his rearview mirror, they tore through the tranquil emptiness of the sandy expanse. Divola equipped himself with a motorized 35mm camera. By pre-setting the device, he could snap a sequence of shots with one hand while keeping the other on the wheel, letting the endless roll of film unfold. Did Jean Baudrillard not write in America (1986) that « the unfolding of the desert is infinitely close to the eternity of the film » ? Here, desert and film extend one another in a single, infinite motion.
« Contemplating a dog chasing a car, » writes Divola, « invites any number of metaphors and juxtapositions: culture and nature, the domestic and the wild, love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the idiotic. It could be viewed as a visceral and kinetic dance. » This choreography of taut canine bodies captures the absurdity of a desperate pursuit. A « hopeless enterprise » that resonates on many levels. These dogs are not merely chasing a car: they are chasing an image they cannot catch, becoming a metaphor for the act of photographing itself and its quest for a crystallized reality, while also evoking the tireless perseverance that defines the human condition.
The series also reflects Divola’s singular approach, imbuing his conceptual practice with whimsical playfulness. Inspired by these desert dogs, he produced the series As Far as I Could Get. Using a ten-second timer, he would trigger the shutter and run as fast as possible to place himself at the farthest point from the lens, becoming a trembling dot within the vast Californian landscape. While his work carries a certain existential melancholy, it never loses its sense of humor.
What ultimately makes Dogs Chasing my Car in the Desert so compelling is the visual poetry of its animal silhouettes, blurred by motion and textured by high-sensitivity film. Its true beauty lies in how, in its elegant simplicity, it draws us back to the very essence of the photographic act.
John Divola – Dogs Chasing my Car in the Desert
Published by Nazraeli Press, 2004/2026
Remastered edition limited to 1000 copies
Hardbound
11.5×12 inches, 48 pages
