One Picture Book Two #42 : Lookout on Highway 74

Lookout on Highway 74 is a collection of 12 photographs taken by American photographer Mimi Plumb in the 1980s. She often visited the lookout during the holidays while visiting her in-laws in Palm Desert, obsessed with photographing a tiny sliver of road in the vast San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains below. Her interests expanded to include the people, young and old, visiting the site, seemingly mesmerized as she was by the stark beauty of the landscape.

Mimi Plumb is part of a long tradition of socially engaged photographers concerned with California and the West. She received a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in support of her current project, Reservoir.