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.
