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Part-artist’s book and part-critical study, a collection of documentary photography that grapples with contemporary California and its many utopic and dystopic meanings. Los Angeles is, as Bertolt Brecht famously wrote in his “Hollywood Elegies,” both heaven and hell. In
List of contents
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
About the author
Andrew Witt is an art historian and critic who writes on contemporary art.
Summary
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.
