Lost Days, Endless Nights

A critical study and artist’s book on the history of photography and film from Los Angeles.

Lost Days, Endless Nights tells a history from below—an account of the lives of the forgotten and dispossessed of Los Angeles: the unemployed, the precariously employed, the evicted, the alienated, the unhoused, the anxious, the exhausted. Through an analysis of abandoned archival works, experimental films, and other projects, Andrew Witt offers an expansive account of the artists who have lived or worked in Los Angeles, delving into the region’s history and geography, highlighting its racial, gender, and class conflicts. Presented as a series of nine case studies, Witt explores how artists as diverse as Agnès Varda, Dana Lixenberg, Allan Sekula, Catherine Opie, John Divola, Gregory Halpern, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Guadalupe Rosales have reimagined and reshaped our understanding of contemporary Los Angeles.

The book features portraits of those who struggle and attempt to get by in the city: dock workers, students, bus riders, petty criminals, office workers, immigrants, queer and trans activists. Set against the landscape of economic turmoil and environmental crises that shadowed the 1970s, Witt highlights the urgent need for a historical perspective of cultural retrieval and counternarrative. Extending into the present, Lost Days, Endless Nights advocates for an approach that actively embraces the works and projects that have been overlooked and evicted from the historical imaginary.1 Lost Days (Gregory Halpern)
2 Ask the Dust (Alan Sekula)
3 You speak of things that haven’t happened yet in the past-tense (John Divola)
4 Counterhistory (Agnes Varda)
5 A Long Way from Paris (Catherine Opie)
6 INTERLUDE: What is lost and what is remembered (Dana Lixenberg)
7 The Dustbin of History (Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan)
8 The Evicted (Anthony Hernandez)
9 Coda: Endless Nights (Guadalupe Rosales)
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index“An immersive look at an especially memorable case of artistic symbiosis.”
—Inside Hook“How does one document the depredations of late capitalism—homelessness, the collapse of a public sphere, environmental injustice—and where better to do this than in Los Angeles in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Here, Andrew Witt gives us a cross-section of contemporary photography as an oblique but powerful tool of resistance with the power “to figure the world otherwise.”
—Angela Miller, Professor, Washington University in St. Louis; coauthor of Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa

“Revelatory. Andrew Witt brings to light the ways that photography and Los Angeles have each defined the other. His spectrum of exemplary photographers breaks with the over-familiar norm in high style. A major contribution.”
—Thomas Crow, The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University

“Rare is the critic who can reveal the poetics of a photograph by attending above all to its materiality, all while considering the social and political histories that provide its ultimate context. Andrew Witt performs this feat time and time again as he shows us how the city of Los Angeles— both as place and idea—has inspired generations of photographers to make work as complex and urgent as is our contemporary moment in history.”
—Zach Ritter, Writer and Editor, American Suburb XAndrew Witt is an art historian and critic who writes on contemporary art.