What Persists, What Remains

Nathan Crompton interviews Andrew Witt about documentary as form and photographing L.A. in an online release from LARB Quarterly no. 45: “Submission.”

By Nathan CromptonJuly 19, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Nonfiction

This interview is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 45: Submission. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

THE TIMING of art historian and critic Andrew Witt’s first book, Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles, was unnerving. The cover image—the hills of Palm Springs on fire, captured in a 2013 photograph by Gregory Halpern—took on a disquieting quality in light of unprecedented wildfires that swept through Los Angeles just days before its publication on January 14, 2025. Halpern’s image was taken from his photo book ZZYZX (2016), a portrait of L.A. and its periphery that earns extended treatment among the opening pages of Witt’s book.

I’ve followed the making of Lost Days, Endless Nights over the years, having read early versions of Witt’s essays on Allan Sekula, Agnès Varda, and John Divola in publications such as the Oxford Art Journal and Getty Research Journal. Even then, I could see how these pieces might one day cohere. During our conversation in my apartment this past February, images familiar from earlier iterations of the project assumed an uncanny quality. As we continued to flip through the book, I felt a sense of promise in its sheer expansiveness: gestures of refusal, glimpses of joy, images that held open possibilities for imagining life otherwise. Witt does far more than simply chronicle the effects and aftermath of catastrophe in Los Angeles; his book serves as a history of the city and its artists, tracing how photographers and filmmakers have responded to their specific moment and environment. It’s a collection of essays that asks what, exactly, it means to make engaged work today amid cycles of eviction, displacement, and erasure, as well as the disorientation created when spectacle replaces memory. Ultimately, the book insists, it is through forms of filmic and photographic countermemory that new aesthetic strategies might emerge—ones capable of confronting the overlapping crises with which we now live.

¤

NATHAN CROMPTON: This book is as much about Los Angeles as it is about photography.

ANDREW WITT: As a reader of art history, I’ve always been drawn to regional histories—thinking through specific moments in time when artists are engaged more closely, often physically, with one another, whether it is seeing each other’s work, going to school together, teaching together, or having conversations and debates about what it means to live and work in a particular place. Regional histories also reveal that an artist’s community doesn’t have to be limited to other artists; a photograph, for instance, might be in conversation with an album, or a film, or the city’s geography and urban history.

Los Angeles is one of those communities, shaped by its own class conflicts, political divides, and decades-old aesthetic debates. I like to think about a lot of this work as hinged to the historical conjuncture in which it is made, with the city as a fundamental part of that conjuncture. Yet a hinge is also a mechanism of movement—it extends outward, opening onto other possibilities and worlds that emerge through and beyond the image.

Can you be specific?

Los Angeles is a city of extremes. A desert meeting the ocean, where over 50,000 people sleep on the streets at any given time. Some of the most compelling work from the city confronts these extremes directly. Yet there is also power in picturing the everyday, the banal, the nonevent; many of these quieter moments deserve our attention in equal measure.

Eviction keeps coming up in these essays, which also—rightly—suggests how certain oppositional forces are evicted from the histor­ical imaginary. These displacements are not just physical but also cultural and ideological. They affect the way histories are told, whose voices are heard.

I’m curious to hear your perspective on a regional model as an approach to writing about photography and history.

Some have balked at “the regional approach,” but such an approach does not exclude the global—that would be a silly and simplistic view, if not a gross misreading of my book and similar works by others. Consider Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1995), which is rightly celebrated as a project on global shipping, the international divisions of labor, and uneven development. It would not be a disavowal of the global to remind the reader that Fish Story begins and ends in Los Angeles. It’s grounded in the port of San Pedro, the life of a working harbor, the struggles of local workers, unemployed welders—all of which Sekula photographs with immense sensitivity. At the same time, the project intersects with larger political moments, like the Rodney King rebellion of 1992, which situate the work in a broader context of social upheaval and resistance. Who speaks about these kinds of connections today?

A regional history foregrounds these aspects and maps them onto larger, often global, struggles. The chapter on Sekula begins with an image photographed during the rebellion in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, a neighborhood where the photographer lived and worked. In developing that narrative, I examined Sekula’s “working notebooks,” which are currently housed in the Getty Research Institute, as a means to explore the day-to-day realities of a photographer’s life: living, teaching, and working in Los Angeles.

Work, which you frame in an expansive sense, is a central question of this book. I see at least three interconnected themes: first, the work of photographers, which calls attention to the labor of the photographer; second, the work the image performs on us as viewers; and third, the wider political economy of work in the contemporary moment, how photography both pictures and critiques broader systems of labor and everything that implies, including alienation, dissatisfaction, deskilling, and exhaustion (if not a desire for liberation from these forces). How do these aspects intersect to reshape our understanding of photographic work today?

I’ll answer this question more directly in a moment. But first, a detour that might be helpful to set things up: one of the most challenging aspects of photographic work begins after the initial encounter. What follows is a slower, more recursive process—working through an archive, taking notes, assembling sequences, and reflecting on what works and doesn’t. (Sometimes, this type of work is a lifelong project.) These recursive questions appear throughout the book.

A photo book rarely follows a straightforward path. Often, it resists a linear trajectory, scuttling our preconceptions, forcing us to linger with the questions it asks and demands of us. As David Campany notes, “There is no script for looking.” This statement highlights the open-ended, indeterminate nature of reading photographs, viewing the sequence where the meaning emerges in the relay between one image and the next. These gaps permit a pause in thought, for you to catch your breath, for your attention to flicker in and out.

The question around photographic work should then involve a discussion about the work the image does on us as viewers, as you say. That relay, that sequencing, the delay in understanding, the wandering and strange movements that are at play when we look at images. The encounter might withhold, insist on us returning, or confront us with an ethical or political demand. Usually, the sitter solicits our gaze but, in the same breath, refuses or rebuffs us (this is emphasized in the book by a long discussion of Judith Butler’s excellent 2004 review of the work of Diane Arbus). When the opportunity arises, I try to give space to this wandering encounter, allowing images to do their work rather than rushing blindly to resolve them. Writing plays a key part in laying this work bare.

And the political economy of labor?

As a social historian, I’m drawn to the methodology often referred to as “history from below”—popularized by the writings and research of Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, and Silvia Federici. Their approach centers narratives around those who have been “dealt out of the deck,” so to speak. This perspective informs the book’s questioning of how photography critiques the system of labor it pictures. It focuses on the lives of working-class people in the city—their stories, their experiences. While it doesn’t tell their story in a traditional narrative, I think it conveys something similar to what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling”: the nascent forms of social experience that are lived and felt but often perceived as private, idiosyncratic, or obscure, yet nonetheless shared.

How does photography make these structures of feeling visible—or turn these fleeting, lived experiences into something that can be collectively recognized and understood?

There is a tendency among art historians to declare certain aesthetic modes, like portraiture or documentary, as exhausted or obsolete, to view them as incapable of expressing anything meaningful. Portraiture, for instance, is often written off as reinforcing a bankrupt notion of bourgeois subjectivity, upholding a form of narcissism, or reclaiming the myth of the lost subject. This argument cedes too much to the other side: photography’s much-maligned objectifying and exploitative tendencies often arise from a hierarchical “look up” or “look down.” Frequently overlooked in discussions of portraiture is the importance of a familiar “look across”—a perspective we encounter in the work of Anthony Hernandez, Dana Lixenberg, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, among many others featured in this book.

A lot of the work here depends on the context and situation in which the photographs are taken, whether that be at bus stops (Hernandez), in the studio or home (Sepuya), or on the grounds of the Watts housing estate of Imperial Courts (Lixenberg). These images do not seek to magically resurrect a lost subject through the act of photographic portraiture. Sepuya, for instance, acknowledges that if portraiture is to persist and survive, it must move through fragmentation, opacity, and ellipsis—frustrating the spectacle in which it is inherently entangled. In a different way, Lixenberg’s long-term engagement with the residents of Imperial Courts reveals how portraiture can function as an act of collective memory and memorialization. This is especially powerful within a culture premised on erasure and eviction, when collective and community ties are assaulted from all angles. Consider the “family tree” of images found at the end of her book, where we are invited to reflect on what persists, what remains, what is lost and forgotten, and, perhaps most poignantly, what is remembered.

There is a real variety of images in this book: Halpern’s psychedelic portraits of the residents of Los Angeles, Divola’s graffitied interiors, Lixenberg’s portraits of the residents of Watts. Arguably, what unites them is their shared relationship to a type of photography that could fall under the heading of “documentary.”

When I began writing these essays, I was struck by how many of the artists self-identify with the documentary tradition—yet their final works are, as you say, wildly different. The book starts with a discussion of Halpern’s strange, elusive photo book ZZYZX. Halpern identifies with the documentary tradition but also finds it limiting. Work, for ZZYZX, often drifts into the otherworldly. I wanted that project to set the general stakes of this book, set the tone for the discussion—and then allow the rest of the chapters to look back.

For me, it really works. Are you worried that some might find it frustrating that these chapters don’t proceed chronologically?

There are quite a few “blue moon moments” in this first chapter and throughout the book as a whole. These moments mess with the demand to think chronologically.

What is a “blue moon moment”?

A blue moon moment is something strange and otherworldly—an anomaly that doesn’t quite fit with the “ordinary” flow of time. Consider again that opening chapter on Halpern, which branches out from Los Angeles and addresses Halpern’s tiny photo book Confederate Moons, photographed during the lunar eclipse of 2017 and published that same year. The work was conceived after Donald Trump’s first election, amid heightened political conflict and right-wing populism in the United States.

Its timing was pivotal: Confederate Moons was finished nine days after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists marched with tiki torches in protest of the removal of Confederate monuments. During a counterprotest on August 12, 2017, 35 were injured and a woman was killed when a motorist drove into the crowd. Just days later, a total solar eclipse darkened the sky. As he photographed in North and South Carolina, Halpern’s work seemed to absorb the charged atmosphere: how the country was being “ripped apart” while the continent collectively experienced the rare, uncanny phenomenon of the moon eclipsing the sun.

This section follows on from a long discussion about the uncontrollable—or what you call the “intractable”—quality of images.

Each artist featured in this book reimagines and transforms the documentary mode, engaging with what I see as a central concern of contemporary documentary work: the intractability of the world. I begin with an epigraph from Allan Sekula: “Modernism is uncomfortable with the intractability of the world. Documentary confronts that intractability head on, as a political and representational-aesthetic problem.” This frames the stakes of the project as a whole—documentary doesn’t smooth over the messiness of the world. It grapples with it directly, embracing the complexities and contradictions of a life lived.

I often find conversations about genre to be boring and limiting. I’ve known colleagues who spent years writing dissertations attempting to define a term like documentary, only to resign themselves to its elusiveness. Those who insist on rigid, dogmatic definitions of a concept or genre often start with a fixed idea or parameter, bending works to fit their preconceptions (and leaving out those that don’t).

The same thing can happen with the contemporary misapplication of theory, where theory is used as a way to make final pronouncements on a work, rather than help you see or understand the world, and can sometimes be a substitute for engaging with a work on its own terms.

I prefer my histories to engage with the world as it is—messy, sprawling, and unresolved. Perhaps theory works best by taking you by the hand and walking you down the beach path. It doesn’t need to walk with you all the way, but there’s a hope you’ll inevitably find the open ocean.

At times, the word “documentary” operates as a synonym for a political way of seeing and working, operating in such a way to reimagine and reinvent a tradition (Sekula). In other instances, it is less politically motivated, simply referring to a type of photography tied to a specific time, place, and circumstance (Divola). Even this latter definition can be somewhat obscure; a documentary image might speak to a record of a time, place, and circumstance, but Divola’s photographs can be hallucinatory and psychedelic, especially the Zuma (1977–78) and Vandalism (1973–75) series. All of this is to say that the documentary mode is capacious, fluid, and inconsistent—its meaning shifts depending on its historical conjuncture, including the internal debates among its practitioners. Over time, I’ve come to recognize that this, documentary’s capaciousness, is its greatest strength.

How do you engage with documentary in a way that allows works to speak for themselves—that doesn’t drown the interpretation in theoretical assumptions or ready-made frameworks, or else fall into a flat and positivist empiricism? Could you potentially also address this in relation to 20th-century debates (realism versus modernism), and so on?

The classic debate between realism versus modernism can get scrambled in Los Angeles, where the documentary surface is rarely stable. As I discuss in the chapter on Catherine Opie and Ed Ruscha, what might appear to be straightforward photographic documents quickly fracture under the pressure of social history. Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), for instance, cannot be separated from the Sunset Strip riots of that same year—but this social fact is rarely (if at all) mentioned.

Alternatively, one of the best models of disorientation and instability is the opening discussion of Divola’s photographs of the MGM backlot. These images are of a ruined set constructed in Culver City—a backlot originally built, in Los Angeles, to resemble New York during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, but later repurposed for postapocalyptic films set in the near future. At the same time, the backlot itself was being actively demolished by a bankrupt studio that had deemed these sets obsolete in the wake of New Hollywood’s emergent realism. In Divola’s hands, the indexical and factual quality of these images is jumbled and confused. 

This is where my work complicates a strict empiricism: the images in this book don’t reflect reality as it is, but they render it strange while also actively pointing to what remains unseen, unspoken, or lost. This approach avoids a flat empiricism, or what is often understood as a “culture of the fact,” recognizing that even the most straightforward images and works contain gaps, voids, and forms of disorientation and not-knowing. The historian must engage with these gaps and make them tangible.

You also engage with specific debates like the framing of Los Angeles as the “graveyard of documentary.” This is a notion Sekula outlined in his posthumously published essay, where he puts forward 13 reasons why social documentary seems impossible in a city like L.A. What do you make of this sense of impossibility?

I take those comments as largely rhetorical. Impossibility, after all, is just another word for a barrier or limit—something to be challenged and overcome. Take the cliché, for example, that no one walks in Los Angeles, which is a simple way of understanding why there are no great street photographers. Of course, this is false. You can have great photographers of the street who also drive (Ruscha being one, his Streets of Los Angeles archive [1965–2010] is an amazing resource). There are photographers who pick up their cameras and walk too, or take the bus. Anthony Hernandez comes to mind.

In that essay, Sekula offers a tentative list of photographers who engage with the social world as it is, yet render it strange; social documentary persists in an almost degraded, undead form. As much as he was an exceptional historian of the medium, he was unaware of Dana Lixenberg’s continued, multidecade-long project documenting the community of Imperial Courts in Watts. I’m certain he knew of Agnès Varda’s work in the city, yet it receives no mention in his writings. Nor did he live long enough to encounter Guadalupe Rosales’s two Instagram accounts, Veteranas and Rucas and Map Pointz, which archive the vernacular photo histories of Los Angeles’s Latinx communities. Both exemplify the kind of sustained, socially engaged work Sekula had not encountered before his untimely death in 2013.

In many ways, this book confronts the same limits Sekula identified, but it does so to reveal how artists in Los Angeles have found ways to move beyond them. The impossibility Sekula described isn’t the end of documentary—it’s where the work begins, where the work lives on, regardless of whether it is perceived as undead or not.

One thing we need to address is the cover—Los Angeles on fire.

The book was published on January 14, 2025, just a week after the catastrophic fires that destroyed large portions of Los Angeles, particularly in the Palisades and Altadena. The timing was unsettling. I can’t begin to fathom the tragedy of losing your home, all of your possessions, or even an entire community … it’s devastating.

One of the questions of this book is about photography and film’s relationship to disaster and catastrophe. It opens with such an image: not only Halpern’s photograph of the hillside of Palm Springs on fire but also a photograph of a flooded field with oranges floating on the surface. Los Angeles and its peripheries have long been framed through its disasters; the city’s greatest writers have taught us that fire is perhaps its deepest and most enduring image. To borrow from the late Mike Davis, disaster saturates almost everything written about the region—it is the work’s ambience, atmosphere, and recurring theme and allegory.

If I’m not mistaken, an early version of the book was titled “California Catastrophe” or something like that. A few examples come to mind that you cite in the book: Nathanael West’s painting The Burning of Los Angeles from The Day of the Locust (1939), Octavia E. Butler’s use of fire in Parable of the Sower (1993), and the ways disaster is employed in the noir genre (often steering the narrative toward a convenient conclusion).

In the book, I ask a relatively simple question: does this preoccupation with catastrophe extend beyond the literary arts to photography as well? Of course, the answer is yes. But this acknowledgment brings with it other questions, particularly about meaning, memory, experience, even knowledge. What does it mean to live and work in the aftermath of these events?

Consider the chapter on Catherine Opie’s work. I titled this chapter “Images of Blood and Fire.” It opens with a little-known photograph by Opie of a burnt-out home—likely the result of arson during the construction of the MacArthur Park subway line—which she shot shortly after completing her MFA at CalArts. This raises the question: what constitutes a disaster? There are the obvious examples: catastrophic fires, floods, and other large-scale tragedies like earthquakes. Yet as we know, “natural” disasters are also very much a socially determined process, especially in a city where, as Mike Davis points out, areas historically prone to wildfires have been redeveloped into upscale residential neighborhoods. Continued development in Los Angeles’s fire zones will only lead to more fires—this is what we should call a socially determined disaster.

Your book moves between aftermaths in art history—the persistence of forms after a movement has been dispersed or has dissipated—alongside aftermaths that are more social, like the fires you just mentioned. Can you say more about this?

I think your point also raises questions of how to persist, how to continue, how to live on in spite of it all. It also suggests another, more insidious model of disaster: the one Walter Benjamin describes as the disaster in which things stay the same. This kind is subtler but no less catastrophic: when systems of inequality and exploitation persist unchecked, even after moments of upheaval that seem to demand change. This is the disaster that often goes unaddressed, and it’s something photography and film have a unique capacity to confront. These mediums can visualize stasis in ways that render it visible and open to critique, however incomplete or fragmented the results may be.

How in particular?

Hernandez’s portrait practice of the late 1970s of bus riders and office workers aligns with this approach, as do Agnès Varda’s L.A. films Mur Murs (1981) and Documenteur (1981). When Varda returned to Los Angeles in 1979, she planned to make a film about an LAPD shooting but found herself unmoored when the project collapsed. Living in Venice with her son during a separation from the filmmaker Jacques Demy, she channeled this sense of dislocation into two films. Mur Murs is a portrait of L.A. through its murals, treating them as a “collective utterance” of the city’s forgotten and dispossessed, with the East L.A. collective Asco—Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie F. Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez—featured throughout. Documenteur, its introspective counterpart, follows a woman searching for an apartment post-breakup. Varda’s editor, Sabine Mamou, played the lead, merging Varda’s personal experience with fiction.

What’s remarkable is how Varda’s approach to these two films collapses the boundaries between documentary and fiction. She viewed them as inseparable, insisting that no documentary is without its lyrical intent and no fiction without a documentary impulse. This blending allowed her to explore not just the visible markers of a personal disaster but also the quieter, more persistent conflicts and inequities that linger beneath the surface of everyday life.

In all her L.A. films, Varda sought not to dramatize crisis but to explore the stalemates and quiet conflicts that emerge in its wake—a perspective that feels especially relevant when thinking through what one would consider this obscure feeling of aftermath.

How do we make sense of the book’s title, Lost Days, Endless Nights?

There’s a tendency in art history to use two-word titles that reduce an entire movement or scene to a single overriding concept—or even a question—around which the entire book revolves. I wanted to avoid that. I didn’t want to restrict my book to this academic convention. I didn’t want the title to curtail what the book is about.

Some of the best art can feel like encountering a fact clearly described. At other times, it can be like the ground suddenly giving way beneath you, similar to what George Saunders describes as a good sentence: “A good literary sentence was like a floor with a hole hidden in it. You dropped into the basement and, scratching your head, thought: ‘Why’d he say it that way?’” Saunders tempers this sentiment, but why shouldn’t the aesthetic encounter be based on both feelings, if not more? The feeling of a fact clearly described, but also the feeling of the ground falling out beneath you.

Ed Ruscha said something similar, right? “Art has to be something that makes you scratch your head.”

This is as good a definition of a great work of art as any. I think a common misconception about art criticism and art history is the assumption that we know what we are looking at when we encounter a work of art. Graduate school, the study of art history in particular, often insists that scholars know what they are writing beforehand, as if certainty must be established before the research even begins. Your research project must tie everything up in a neat bow.

Of course, there are works that directly address specific political conditions or conjunctures. But there are also works that resist our capacity to say with certainty what we are looking at, works that open a space for us to think alongside them, or through them. What I am describing isn’t an exercise in free-floating speculation—it is a search, a process of inquiry. Writing, for me, is bound up in this search, and it should make this search visible, laying it bare in the hopes of arriving somewhere unexpected. Can a book’s title do something similar? Can it convey that initial sense of disorientation, or at least point to the states of reverie brought forth by looking and writing about images?

You still haven’t quite answered the question. To put it differently: There’s a nod to Proust in your title too, no? A search for lost time, albeit not one that’s stated explicitly?

Exactly. I wanted my title to be more Proustian, to suggest states of reverie and daydream, bringing us closer to the working process—getting lost in the details, the minutiae of a life, the chance encounters in which life is formed and which so much of photography is attracted to. Let’s not forget, either, the ways in which these same images affect us as viewers. For those who walk the streets of Los Angeles, you know this feeling, balancing feelings of exhaustion and elation. This state of reverie contrasts with the final chapter of the book, entitled “Endless Nights,” which features Guadalupe Rosales’s nighttime photographs of East L.A., and Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s studio portraits of lovers, friends, and models. At the eleventh hour of writing the book, I encountered this amazing collaboration between Rosales and Sepuya. For an exhibition at the Gordon Parks Foundation in 2019, they arranged materials from Rosales’s Veteranas and Rucas archive on a mirror, partially obscured by a black curtain, a composition that loosely echoed both Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1929) and also the bedroom wall of a teenager—operating as a makeshift altar to the Latinx community of Los Angeles and its underground party culture.

The notion of “endless nights” has a strange double valence: it contains both positive and negative undercurrents. Rosales’s work is about the party scene in East L.A. in the 1990s. I wanted the chapter to conjure that amazing feeling of walking home after dancing all night, that ecstatic sense of being taken outside of yourself. Ecstasy is not pure joy, but the feeling that you are coming face-to-face with something that is not you. As I mentioned, that chapter also includes a short section on Sepuya’s photographs of queer intimacy. In these images, there is both a wish and a promise for the encounter to go on forever, as well as the simultaneous insistence on the irreducible instant, outside of any eternity or permanence.

Could you say more about the negative undercurrents?

In adopting this title, I also wanted it to reflect on these “lost moments” of the photographic encounter: moments that make sense of what photographers do, whether it is the act of photographing someone you just met and will never see again or wandering the streets at night, drawn to the same familiar back alleys where, as a teenager, you ran from the police after attending a rave. In Rosales’s case, it might mean something more difficult and unspeakable, returning to the site where her cousin was murdered in an act of gang violence. All of this points to an ontological paradox for photography: the lost moment, fixed as an image for some indeterminate afterlife.

This book is drawn to images characterized by their obstinacy and complexity. Unlike other mediums, photography is incapable of repairing what is broken; rather, it exposes the messiness, contingency, and complexity of the world. The viewer is left to sift through the fragments.

¤

Featured image: Cover of Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles (2025) by Andrew Witt. Detail of Gregory Halpern, ZZYZX, 2016. Cover has been cropped.