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.

An investigation of mathematics as it was drawn, encoded, imagined, and interpreted by architects on the eve of digitization in the mid-twentieth century.In Formulations, Andrew Witt examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. The linkages Witt explores involve not the mystic transcendence of numbers invoked throughout architectural history, but rather architecture’s encounters with a range of calculational systems—techniques that architects inventively retooled for design. Witt offers a catalog of mid-twentieth-century practices of mathematical drawing and calculation in design that preceded and anticipated digitization as well as an account of the formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects.Witt presents a series of extensively illustrated “biographies of method”—episodes that chart the myriad ways in which mathematics, particularly the mathematical notion of modeling and drawing, was spliced into the creative practice of design. These include early drawing machines that mechanized curvature; the incorporation of geometric maquettes—“theorems made flesh”—into the toolbox of design; the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry; formal and functional topology; stereoscopic drawing; the economic implications of cubic matrices; and a strange synthesis of the technological, mineral, and biological: crystallographic design. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt uses mathematics as a lens through which to understand the relationship between architecture and a much broader set of sciences and visual techniques. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.

This book analyzes the community programs of the Black Panther Party, specifically those of the Milwaukee branch, with the aim of dispelling many of the existing stereotypes about the Party. Misconceptions range from the Party being labeled as bent on the violent destruction of the United States to it being an overwhelmingly sexist group. This book challenges stereotypes such as these by examining the community programs of the Party and by looking at the role of women in the Party. Witt argues that the Party was not an extremist group dedicated to overthrowing the government of the United States, but rather an organization committed to providing essential community services for lower-income and working-class African American communities around the nation.

This book analyzes the community programs of the Black Panther Party, specifically those of the Milwaukee branch, with the aim of dispelling many of the existing stereotypes about the Party. Misconceptions range from the Party being labeled as bent on the violent destruction of the United States to it being an overwhelmingly sexist group. This book challenges stereotypes such as these by examining the community programs of the Party and by looking at the role of women in the Party. Witt argues that the Party was not an extremist group dedicated to overthrowing the government of the United States, but rather an organization committed to providing essential community services for lower-income and working-class African American communities around the nation.

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.

An investigation of mathematics as it was drawn, encoded, imagined, and interpreted by architects on the eve of digitization in the mid-twentieth century.In Formulations, Andrew Witt examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. The linkages Witt explores involve not the mystic transcendence of numbers invoked throughout architectural history, but rather architecture’s encounters with a range of calculational systems—techniques that architects inventively retooled for design. Witt offers a catalog of mid-twentieth-century practices of mathematical drawing and calculation in design that preceded and anticipated digitization as well as an account of the formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects.Witt presents a series of extensively illustrated “biographies of method”—episodes that chart the myriad ways in which mathematics, particularly the mathematical notion of modeling and drawing, was spliced into the creative practice of design. These include early drawing machines that mechanized curvature; the incorporation of geometric maquettes—“theorems made flesh”—into the toolbox of design; the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry; formal and functional topology; stereoscopic drawing; the economic implications of cubic matrices; and a strange synthesis of the technological, mineral, and biological: crystallographic design. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt uses mathematics as a lens through which to understand the relationship between architecture and a much broader set of sciences and visual techniques. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.

This book analyzes the community programs of the Black Panther Party, specifically those of the Milwaukee branch, with the aim of dispelling many of the existing stereotypes about the Party. Misconceptions range from the Party being labeled as bent on the violent destruction of the United States to it being an overwhelmingly sexist group. This book challenges stereotypes such as these by examining the community programs of the Party and by looking at the role of women in the Party. Witt argues that the Party was not an extremist group dedicated to overthrowing the government of the United States, but rather an organization committed to providing essential community services for lower-income and working-class African American communities around the nation.

This book analyzes the community programs of the Black Panther Party, specifically those of the Milwaukee branch, with the aim of dispelling many of the existing stereotypes about the Party. Misconceptions range from the Party being labeled as bent on the violent destruction of the United States to it being an overwhelmingly sexist group. This book challenges stereotypes such as these by examining the community programs of the Party and by looking at the role of women in the Party. Witt argues that the Party was not an extremist group dedicated to overthrowing the government of the United States, but rather an organization committed to providing essential community services for lower-income and working-class African American communities around the nation.