John Divola’s Vandalism presents a body of work made in Los Angeles between 1974 and 1975, when the photographer, then in his mid-twenties and without a studio, sought out dilapidated and vacant houses as places in which to work. These abandoned interiors were not simply found subjects. Divola entered them with a camera, spray paint, string and cardboard, altering their surfaces before photographing what he had done.

The resulting black-and-white images occupy an unstable ground between evidence and invention. Graffiti-like constellations, string pinned into ritualistic configurations and torn pieces of card interrupt rooms already marked by neglect. Divola’s camera describes these interventions with the directness of forensic documentation, yet the acts behind them belong equally to performance, sculpture and installation. Each photograph therefore records both an existing site and a temporary construction imposed upon it.

Made when photography’s claims to truth were being forcefully reconsidered, Vandalism unsettles the usual distinction between observing the world and staging it. The work does not conceal the artist’s interference; that interference is its central fact. Damage, authorship and documentation become difficult to separate, while the vacant house functions at once as subject, studio and exhibition space. This tension helped define the photographic language for which Divola became known.

Published by MACK in 2018, the 120-page hardcover gives concentrated form to this early project. Its importance for a serious photobook collection rests not on bibliographic claims, but on the clarity with which it embodies a decisive conceptual problem: how a photograph can appear evidentiary while recording a scene deliberately transformed for the camera. Vandalism is especially relevant to collections concerned with postwar American photography and the crossings among conceptual art, installation, performance and the photographic document.