CHROMA by John Divola

A collection of works by American visual artist John Divola.

This is an unpublished work that Divola had been working on since his masterpiece, "Zuma." In a conversation with British curator David Company at the end of the book, Divola points out how we associate everything with color. "CHROMA" shakes up the viewer's perception by attaching color filters and snoots to strobes, inviting us to a strange world that is familiar yet somehow unnatural, like a parallel world.

"Right after Zuma I made a series of more straightforward photographs of the abandoned housing estate behind Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Culver City, Los Angeles. These were black and white photographs, but then I started to do something completely different. Around 1980 I began a series of works about things that cannot be captured in a photograph: gravity, magnetism, the way water flows, what you see when you press the palm of your hand against your eye.

I also made the transition from the color negative film I used for Zuma to large-format positive film. My early C-type color prints faded badly, so I wanted a new, more stable material. The very industrial, artificial, deeply saturated and contrasted prints in this series are all Cibachrome, printed directly from the positive film. Cibachrome was a very flawed material in traditional photography, but it had very unique properties that I ended up adopting. John Divola

Limited to 800 copies.

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Title: CHROMA
Artist: John Divola
Skinnerboox, 2020
Hardcover, 200 x 240 mm
80 pages
Text/Interview by David Campany
First edition of 800 copies
ISBN 978-88-94895-33-9
¥5,100 + tax