In the early 1970s, before the serial projects that would define his career, John Divola photographed middle-aged women shopping for groceries in the San Fernando Valley, where he grew up. Working in black and white, he kept close to the aisles and checkouts, registering ordinary gestures and unguarded faces. The supermarket becomes a kind of stage: fluorescent light, carts, and the routine of provision supply the material for a young artist testing how much feeling an apparently neutral setting can hold.

The publisher describes these photographs as melancholy — a quality it says runs through most of Divola’s subsequent work — and, by their nature, humorously touching. That double register keeps them from documentary neutrality. The humor is not at anyone’s expense; it emerges from the friction between the everyday errand and the camera’s attentiveness. The women are not types in a sociological survey but individuals caught in moments that are at once completely ordinary and unexpectedly exposed.

One Picture Book #81: Supermarket is published by Nazraeli Press in hardcover, sixteen pages, with seven duotone plates and one original photograph signed by Divola. The One Picture Book series treats the format as integral to the work: a small, concentrated sequence in which a short body of work can be seen as a whole rather than as scattered images. The duotone printing gives blacks and mid-tones a depth suited to the subject, while the tipped-in original photograph ties the volume to the artist’s hand rather than to reproduction alone.

Within Divola’s career, Supermarket belongs to the beginning. The publisher noted an upcoming San Fernando Valley monograph, but these earlier pictures stand on their own: quieter, more dependent on social observation, and marked by the same unease that would later be directed at empty rooms and altered interiors. For anyone following Divola’s development, or the photography of Southern California in the 1970s, this is a compact, consequential book.