As Far As I Could Get

John Divola (1949)

A self-portrait series on aging and mortality, made by setting a ten-second self-timer and running away from a tripod-mounted camera.

Description

As Far As I Could Get, made by John Divola from 1996 to 2010 during travels through desert areas, including a 2010 reprise near Twentynine Palms, California, records the photographer running away from a self-timed camera.

Divola conceived the photographs as residues of activity rather than illustrations of a predetermined feeling. Made as he approached fifty, the repeated sprint examines aging, mortality, bodily limitation, and photography's capacity to preserve a specific encounter. It also tests an ironic wish to escape culture: the runner seeks distance in remote terrain, yet settlement continually shifts the boundary between nature and culture. The project extends Divola's engagement with Southern California's urban-natural margins, turning landscape into a field where solitude, place, and human presence meet. Although the method is performative, he understood the photograph as an indexical imprint, not a study of performance itself.

The 1996–97 photographs use tall, black-and-white frames in which a small, blurred figure moves toward a horizon across sparse or interstitial terrain. Grain partially absorbs the body, while open ground and sky dominate the composition, creating a sense of distance and isolation.

The procedure gave that visual distance a fixed rule. Divola mounted a camera on a tripod, established the frame, pressed a ten-second self-timer, and ran away as fast as possible before the exposure. He used very grainy 35mm film for the original phase and later presented examples as black-and-white pigment prints. For the 2009–10 reprise, he adapted the same basic action to high-resolution Gigapan technology, producing a wide panoramic image distinct from the vertical 35mm photographs.

A selection appeared at the Hammer/UCLA Museum in Los Angeles during the 2000 COLA exhibition. By early 2008, Farewell Books had issued a compact 28-page pamphlet containing 13 images. Institutional recognition expanded with the 2013-14 career survey John Divola: As Far As I Could Get, organized across Pomona College Museum of Art, LACMA, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The series later appeared in Gallery Luisotti's Paris Photo presentation and Super Dakota's Brussels exhibition in 2023.

Behind the work

The series began while Divola was travelling through desert areas for his Isolated Houses project; he enjoyed driving desert roads, working alone outdoors, and being free from interruption.

Divola preferred to photograph in early morning or late afternoon because Southern California desert light was generally too bright at midday outside winter.

The project unfolded in two phases: an initial group made in 1996–97 and a high-resolution Gigapan reprise in 2009–10. One documented 2010 panorama combines a ten-second run with a capture interval lasting from 3:29 to 3:42 PM; its title records the date, time zone, and GPS coordinates.

Quotes by the photographer

"On a more personal note, I made these photographs as I was approaching 50 years of age. An age when it becomes clear that one is unlikely to get better-looking, smarter, or, certainly, to run any faster. Thus, to some degree this work is anchored in an expression of mortality."

"On a material level, these photographs are shot with a very grainy 35mm film. I am interested in being absorbed into the grain of the image. I am drawn to the industrial nature of the processes and material as they intersect with fundamental human desires."

"In some of my past work, I have intervened in front of the camera in ways ranging from the simple to the complex. Sometimes elaborately painting or constructing objects and spaces, and at other times making very simple gestures. I am drawn to photographs as remnants of activity and byproducts of process."

"I was interested initially in the idea of this kind of desire to be outside of culture or to get away. Of course, it’s an ironic desire because you build your house in kind of the most remote place, but the line just kind of moves in front of you and you end up kind of converting nature into culture as you go, to implement [an] ironic desire to be outside."

"Indexicality is absolutely essential to my practice to the present. I’m completely invested in the idea that the photograph is, in some sense—and I put in quotes—an ‘authentic imprint of circumstance.’"

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