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 asks how artists as various as Agnès Varda to Dana Lixenberg, Allan Sekula to Catherine Opie, John Divola to Gregory Halpern have reimagined and revised 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.

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Andrew Witt is an art historian and critic who writes on contemporary art.