In the summer of 2007, Deutsche Bank commissioned John Divola to photograph ten Italian cities as part of an initiative to open thirty new branches across the country. He was the first of three artists from three continents selected for the project, and he ultimately worked in twelve cities. Shortly after he returned home, the Great Recession began, and the bank abandoned the initiative; the commissioned work has never been publicly shown. While engaged with that assignment, Divola also photographed Italian cars. That side project, presented here as One Picture Book Two #48, is a distinct body of work, not the unseen commission itself.

The photographs take the automobile as a found motif rather than a subject of advertising. Presented in a hardcover volume of sixteen pages with thirteen color plates, the sequence is compact by design, and the book’s format asks the images to function as a set rather than as individual highlights. Divola’s work is held by institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and has been widely exhibited and collected across the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia.

The circumstances surrounding the side project give the book its particular weight. It belongs to a period when a large institutional commission was underway and then withdrawn, and it preserves a body of work made alongside a project whose broader output remains unseen. For readers interested in how photographers respond to assigned terrain, the book shows a parallel investigation running beside the official one, with its own subject and its own logic.

The edition is limited to five hundred numbered copies, and each copy includes a 5 x 7 inch original print signed by the artist. For collectors of Divola’s work or of the One Picture Book Two series, the book offers a self-contained sequence by a significant American photographer, issued with a signed print and situated at a revealing moment in his career.