Alia Malley’s Captains of the Dead Sea begins from a familiar disorientation: standing in Death Valley and finding the terrain legible only through pictures already seen elsewhere — Mars, the Moon, a science-fiction set. The project asks how prior photographs condition what a place can mean, and how the American desert has served cinema as a location that doubles for other worlds. Published by Nazraeli Press as the nineteenth title in the One Picture Book Two series, the book carries thirteen four-color plates across sixteen pages in a hardcover volume of roughly six by eight and a half inches. Its scale suits an argument built on juxtaposition: images close enough to converse, few enough that nothing is filler.
Malley’s background informs the work without overdetermining it. She studied critical film studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and later took an MFA in visual arts at the University of California, Riverside. Her practice in photography and video examines modes of representation, with attention to landscape, cinematic narratives of place, technology, and human geography as they operate within structures of power. Captains of the Dead Sea concentrates those concerns on a specific terrain and a specific habit of looking, where documentary description and fictional staging are no longer easily separated.
That the book belongs to a numbered series is part of its character rather than an afterthought. Each copy is limited to 500 numbered examples and includes a 5×7 inch original photograph signed by the artist. The pairing of a tightly edited sequence with a signed print makes the object both a reading copy and a collection item, and it places Malley’s work within a publisher’s sustained commitment to the photobook as a form with its own grammar.
For collectors drawn to landscape photography that interrogates its own conventions, or to work about the desert as image and idea, this title holds a clear position. Malley’s photographs have entered public and private collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA Library Special Collections, and the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection. The book’s compact sequence is not a survey but a concentrated statement about how thoroughly pictures mediate the ground beneath us.
