Dr. Andrew Witt
Andrew Witt is the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His teaching interests include the history of photography, contemporary art, and museum studies. Andrew completed his PhD at University College London in 2017 and his MA at UCL in 2010.
Andrew is currently working on a book manuscript, Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles (MIT Press). The project investigates how a group of artists reimagined the aesthetic and political capacities of documentary photography and film in the shadow of contemporary social, ecological, and anti-colonial uprisings. This constellation of photographers and filmmakers includes John Divola, Christina Fernandez, Gregory Halpern, Anthony Hernandez, Kahlil Joseph, Dana Lixenberg, Catherine Opie, Martha Rosler, Guadalupe Rosales, Allan Sekula, as well as members of the LA Rebellion.
His second book project is titled, Exile Modernism, and examines how the medium of photography was reimagined in the context of mass migration and displacement during the Second World War. The project questions how social and historical memory was pictured, transfigured, and obscured by photographs when placed under the pressures of immigration and exile. From this research, he is developing a publication on the photographic work of Ellen Auerbach, Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid, Germaine Krull, and Rose Mandel.
Andrew is a regular contributor to Artforum and an affiliate fellow at The Institute for Cultural Inquiry | ICI Berlin.
Peer-Reviewed Publications:
‘Allan Sekula: Photographic Work’ Getty Research Journal, Volume 14 (August 2021), 151-179.
‘Roy DeCarava: Eyes to Hear,’ Philosophy of Photography, Volume 11, Numbers 1 & 2, (March 2021), 29-48.
‘The Evicted,’ Arts 2019, 8 (3), 95.
” You speak of things that haven’t happened yet in the past-tense ‘| John Divola’s Los Angeles, ‘ Oxford Art Journal , Vol. 41, issue 3, December 2018, 403-426.
‘Evidence,’ Tate: In Focus Papers , June 2017.
‘Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange,’ (with Nathan Crompton) October , Vol. 135 Winter.
Conference Presentations:
‘Ecstatic Time,’ About Time: Temporality in American Art and Visual Culture, Université de Paris, November 3-5, 2021.
‘Maya Deren: Images Future Past,’ 1940s in Focus: American Art in the Decade of Transition, Courtauld Institute of Art, June 2-3, 2021.
‘Zombie Realism: Ed Ruscha,’ Association for Art History, organized by Dr. Zanna Gilbert, April 16 2021.
‘Photography and Possession: Maya Deren in Haiti’ College Art Association 2020, February 12, 2020.
‘Agnès Varda in California,’ Counterhistory: Latent and Underground Currents in American Art. Humboldt University Berlin. July 13, 2019.
” It must be done with mirrors’ | Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, ‘American Art in the 1940s, Global Currents, Local Tides. Terra Foundation for American Art. April 15-16, 2019.
‘Exile Modernism,’ Diasporic Imaginaries, German Forum for Art History, Center Allemand d’Historie de L’Art, Paris. April 4-5, 2019.
‘Exile Modernism: The Photographic Work of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid,’ College Art Association 2019, February 14, 2019.
‘Ask the dust,’ Approaching the Sea: Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, MACK Books, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, October 24, 2018.
‘Los Angeles: A Speculative Fiction,’ Los Angeles: A Fiction , Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo Norway, November 10, 2016.
‘Proust and Illumination,’ Proust Project , University College London. June 11, 2016. Organized by Briony Fer and Rye Dag Holmboe.
‘You speak of things that haven’t happened yet in the past-tense,’ Materials / Discourse Project , December 10, 2015.
‘Figuring Disaster, Prefiguring Catastrophe | The Case of Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, ‘ Historical Materialism 12th Annual Conference, The old is dying and the new can not be born: states, strategies, socialisms, November 5 to 8, 2015.
‘Valences of Destruction: Allan Sekula and the Comic,’ Crash and Burn: Destruction in American Art , Courtauld Institute of Art, June 5, 2015.
‘Working Worlds,’ with Rye Dag Holmboe at Working Worlds , University College London, 16 May 2015.
‘Dead Labor,’ 41st Annual Association for Art Historians, East Anglia, Death, Between Sublimation and the Real , April 9-11, 2015.
‘Riots, Strikes and Mass Mobilization: A Contemporary Account of the Conflict Image,’ Visual Cultures in Crisis , York University, UK, May 11, 2013.
Reviews:
Senga Nengudi at Lenbachhaus, Munich. September 17 2019 – January 19, 2020.
‘Allan Sekula: Ask the dust,’ American Suburb X, November 24, 2018.
‘Painting and Obstinacy,’ Peripheral Review, May 9, 2018.
‘Splendor without diminishment: On Vancouver Photography,’ American Suburb X , February 14, 2018.
‘A Shattered Mirror: Geoffrey Farmer’s Disobedient Object in Venice,’ Momus . August 16, 2017.
‘Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine,’ Alexander Nemerov, History of Photography, Vol. 41, Summer, 2017, 319-321.
‘Eccentric, Polymorphous, Abstract: Vancouver Art and Other Mythologies of the Near-Future,’ The Mainlander, January 17, 2017.
‘To Dwell in the Contradictions,’ Oxford Art Journal , Special Issue on Paul Strand, Vol. 38, issue 1 Oxford. 155-157.
‘The Vancouver Art Gallery and the Eviction of a Political Idea,’ The Mainlander , July 13, 2013.