Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, made by John Divola from 1996 to 1998 in eastern Morongo Valley, Southern California, follows dogs as they pursue his moving car across desert roads.
The series emerged while Divola was driving through the region to photograph Isolated Houses, when recurring chases became a subject in their own right. Rather than assigning the encounters a fixed metaphor, he examines how literal description opens onto symbolic interpretation. The chase brings culture and nature, domesticity and wildness, joy and fear, and persistence and futility into unstable relation. His comparison between a dog unable to catch a car and a camera unable to capture reality makes photography's limitations part of the subject. In the sparsely occupied desert, each animal, house, and horizon assumes unusual perceptual weight.
Across the black-and-white photographs, dogs appear from the side of a vehicle at close and shifting angles. Grain, motion blur, tilted horizons, cropped limbs, and irregular framing register the combined speed of animal, car, and camera. Some bodies remain legible against scrub, roads, dispersed buildings, and mountains, while others dissolve into streaks. The imagery's mood moves between comic pursuit, kinetic tension, and vulnerability. Alongside individual photographs, Divola extended the series into multi-panel Run Sequence works, arranging successive frames from a single chase so that movement unfolds across a fragmented photographic sequence.
Divola used a motor-driven 35mm camera and fast, grainy black-and-white film. During a dog’s pursuit of the car, he might expose only a few frames or an entire roll, and he sometimes turned around to make another pass. Gelatin-silver prints established the project's principal exhibition form, while later pigment and inkjet versions and multi-panel arrangements extended its scale and serial structure.
First published by Nazraeli Press in 2004, the book was remastered in 2025. Early presentations included Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles and Palm Springs Art Museum in 2005, followed by a Santa Monica exhibition and Los Angeles Metro installation. The project later entered the three-institution 2013-14 retrospective John Divola: As Far as I Could Get, with Santa Barbara Museum of Art acquiring D24 Run Sequence. Prints also entered the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and George Eastman Museum. Presentations in New York in 2023 and Getxophoto in Spain in 2025 renewed attention to its comic, existential, and serial dimensions.
