John Divola’s Three Acts brings together three photographic projects made during the 1970s—Vandalism, LAX NAZ, and Zuma—each centered on buildings already marked for abandonment or destruction. Published by Aperture in 2006, the book sets these related bodies of work into a single structure, revealing how Divola repeatedly redefined the boundary between documenting a place and altering it.
In Vandalism, black-and-white photographs show the interiors of deserted houses where Divola spray-painted dots, lines, and grids. The marks invoke both graffiti and the gestural language of painting, yet the camera turns each intervention into a measured, spatial proposition. LAX NAZ shifts the artist’s position. Working in a condemned neighborhood acquired by Los Angeles International Airport as a noise buffer, Divola recorded evidence left by earlier intruders: shattered windows, forced doors, and other signs of violent entry. Here he becomes less an instigator than an observer reading a scene after the event.
Zuma complicates those roles further. Divola photographed an abandoned beachfront property as it deteriorated, combining color, painted interventions, and the changing presence of the natural world. Sunsets and open skies appear beside a structure steadily moving toward ruin. The resulting tension resists both romantic landscape and neutral documentation: beauty, damage, authorship, and entropy remain inseparable.
The book’s significance lies in the dialogue created by its three-part construction. Seen together, the series clarify Divola’s sustained inquiry into photography as document, evidence, and deliberate act. David Campany’s essay situates the work in relation to forensic looking and the redefinition of art and photography during the period, while Jan Tumlir’s interview adds Divola’s account of his methods and ideas. For collectors attentive to conceptual photography and to the photobook as a form of comparative sequencing, Three Acts offers a concentrated view of an interconnected body of work rather than an isolated selection of images.
