The fifty-third entry in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series is built around a roadside sign photographed by Joe Deal. In 1983, as the inland basin of Southern California was subdivided and filled with new residents, a sign reading “Indian Bingo” came into view for drivers emerging east through the San Gorgonio Pass toward the Coachella Valley and Palm Springs. The sign, unusual in meaning and appearance, is the book’s central subject. Nazraeli published the volume in 2008, years after the photograph was made, so the book presents a belated look back at a landscape already altered by the time of publication.
The book’s form is compact: hardcover, sixteen pages, four duotone plates, and one original print. The duotones carry the sequence, while the original photographic print gives each copy a physical presence that reproduction cannot supply. At roughly five and a half by seven and a quarter inches, the book keeps the viewing experience close to the scale of a glance from a moving car. This small format is characteristic of the series, but it also suits the subject, which is a brief encounter at the threshold between desert and development.
Deal’s photograph stands at a junction of land, signage, and social change. The sign announces a form of commerce tied to tribal sovereignty, and its placement at the edge of a subdivided basin makes it a marker of competing claims on the landscape. Southern California’s interior was being remade quickly, and the sign’s odd wording and appearance register that transformation without editorializing. The book does not attempt a comprehensive survey; it concentrates on one image and its implications, using the sequence and the original print to sustain attention on a single roadside fact.
For collectors of postwar American landscape photography, the book’s significance lies in its combination of subject, artist, and format. Joe Deal is the photographer, and the One Picture Book series is a recognized publishing project that pairs a small group of reproductions with an original print. This title contributes a specific Southern California image to that series, and it will interest readers who follow Deal’s attention to the edges of Western settlement or who collect the series as a whole. It is a focused, characteristic work rather than an occasional piece.
