Yoko Ikeda’s Desert Daze began with a summer 2024 road trip through California in the company of Toshio Shibata. The route ran from Los Angeles up the Central Coast to Paso Robles, then east to Nipton, Lone Pine, and the Mojave Desert. Ikeda worked with both film and digital cameras; the publisher describes the resulting book as weaving two stories in parallel. It appears as One Picture Book Two #51 from Nazraeli Press, a hardcover volume of 16 pages with 16 four-color plates.

After returning to Japan, Ikeda processed her film and discovered it had been fogged, most likely by airport X-rays. That accident gave the project its peculiar register. The publisher notes that the hazed photographs call up the desert journey itself: heat rising off the roads and the vague feeling of being far from home. The images do not simply document a route; they carry the exposure and displacement of travel into the print.

Desert Daze is not an album of landmarks. It is a small, sequential work in which the photographic record and the conditions of its making are difficult to separate. The book form suits that intimacy: the sequence is compact, turn by turn, between hard covers. The digital and film pictures run alongside each other, and the fogged negatives introduce a tonal uncertainty that belongs to the journey rather than to any single view.

The edition is limited to 500 numbered copies, each including a 5 by 7 inch original print signed by the artist. Collectors of Ikeda’s work, of Nazraeli’s series, or of photographic books that turn process into subject will find the combination worth attention: a signed print and a tightly edited sequence, where the mishap of fogged film becomes part of the book’s meaning.