Mimi Plumb visited a lookout above Highway 74 while staying with relatives in Palm Desert, drawn back on holiday trips by a small stretch of road set against the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains below. That sliver of asphalt, nearly lost in the larger landform, gives the project its scale and its tension: a human mark measured against geology. Nazraeli Press publishes the series of twelve photographs from the 1980s as the forty-second title in One Picture Book Two, a hardcover volume of sixteen pages with twelve duotone plates.

Plumb’s attention widened from the road itself to the people, young and old, visiting the site, held there by the same stark beauty she was. The book keeps both registers in view, landscape and visitor, without letting one settle the other. Its brevity matters. Sixteen pages and twelve plates impose a compressed sequence, closer to a sustained glance than a survey, and the pairing of images asks the reader to weigh distance, scale and the act of looking as related problems rather than separate subjects.

Plumb belongs to a long tradition of socially engaged photographers concerned with California and the West. Her pictures are held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and other institutions; a solo exhibition organized by the High Museum of Art is scheduled for 2026. Seen against that record, this small book is a concentrated early chapter, not a footnote.

For collectors, form and content are hard to separate here. The edition is limited to 500 numbered copies, each with a 5×7 inch original print signed by the photographer. A tightly edited sequence and an original print together make the volume both a reading object and a primary artifact, and they reward attention to how Plumb’s concerns with land, distance and the people who pause to look are already fully present.