John Divola

Dogs chasing my car

HC 29 x 31 cm.
Nazraeli 2004

"From 1995 to 1998 I worked on a series of photographs of isolated houses in the desert at the east-end of the Morongo Valley in Southern California. As I meandered through the desert, a dog would occasionally chase my car. Sometime in 1996 I began to bring along a 35mm camera equipped with a motor drive and loaded with a fast and grainy black-and-white film. The process was simple; when I saw a dog coming toward the car I would pre-focus the camera and set the exposure. With one hand on the steering wheel, I would hold the camera out the window and expose anywhere from a few frames to a complete roll of film. I'll admit that I was not above turning around and taking a second pass in front of a house with an enthusiastic dog. Contemplating a dog chasing a car 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. 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 devotion to a hopeless enterprise." ? John Divola, 2004

Edition of 1000 copies. Exhibition in Rencontres de Photographie Arles.

Andere Titel von John Divola:

Isolated Houses
Continuity
Three Acts
Seven Dogs

Ausstellungen von/mit John Divola

» Check: John Divola @ Photography-now.com

31.01. - 19.04.2009: THIS SIDE OF PARADISE : LOS ANGELES (1865-2008) - Le paradis, ou presque - Los Angeles (1865-2008) , Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, CH
10.01. - 07.03.2009: Dark Star , Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica, USA
15.02. - 24.03.2007: Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert , G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, USA
30.11. - 23.12.2006: Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, USA
24.10. - 25.02.2007: Where We Live: Photographs of America From the Berman Collection , The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, USA