Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles

by Andrew Witt

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 Lost Days, Endless Nights, Andrew Witt asks what it means to live and work in LA, not in a general or universal sense, but in the sense of extreme, often unbearable situations. Offering an expansive account of the artists, photographers, and filmmakers who lived or worked in Los Angeles and took its people, landscapes, and social relations as their subject, this book considers the photographic cultures of contemporary Los Angeles. The range of images collected here run from the 1970s to the present. Lost Days, Endless Nights narrates a history from below—a history that pivots on the lives of the forgotten and dispossessed of Los the unemployed, the precariously employed, the evicted, the unhoused, the depressed, and the exhausted. The book features portraits of those who struggle and attempt to get by in the from city’s dock workers, students, bus riders, petty criminals, office workers, immigrants, queer and trans activists. These portraits are set against the backdrop of images of natural disasters, ruined interiors, and smashed-in windows. Arguing that the current historical moment, marked by economic disaster and environmental catastrophe, necessitates a form of cultural recovery and counter-narrative, Witt advocates for a historical perspective that actively embraces the works and projects obscured and neglected throughout history.

384 pages, Hardcover

Published January 14, 2025

Reviews

[Maomi Ito · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written. The chapters on Gregory Halpern, Agnes Varda, and Allan Sekula are especially brilliant. A must-read for photographers, art historians, and anyone fascinated by LA’s art and culture.

[Matthew Highland · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s rare to encounter a book on photographic history that is equally attentive to the political capacities of the medium and its formal innovations. Witt’s study is a genuine intervention in the field, reshaping how we think about photography’s possibilities.