“The desert is not empty,” the photographer John Divola has said. “However, it is vacant enough to bestow a certain weight to whatever is present. Add this to a heightened awareness of your own presence and the desert can take on an existential quality.” Between 1995 and 1998, Divola spent time in the high desert of Southern California. There he came across abandoned homes and lone dogs, which he turned into two of his best-known series. Under the Western sky and surrounded by nature’s vastness, the ephemerality of Divola’s subjects shines through. —Clara Molot