LA Harbor News

Photographer David Wittig joins the ranks of growing notoriety with his latest collection now showcased at Leica Gallery in Los Angeles. 

"This Page Intentionally Left Blank," while a radical departure from Wittig's usual form, beautifully captures the decaying preservation of composed histories detailing bizarre, secret and deadly U.S. government orders that are now declassified. This rising photographer is displaying his latest feat in capturing historically secret, lost and bizarre U.S. government declassified stories.

"These pieces are simultaneously an exploration of formal notions of beauty and composition put forth by modernist painters like Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and Mondrian, while also a documentation of what were once some of the most closely guarded secrets of this country - secrets that though long ago declassified, continue to shape our lives and paint a picture of who we are as people," Wittig said about his collection.

Some items Wittig knew he wanted to find a way to capture photographically encompassed a "car-size hydrogen bomb that disappeared on the shores of South Carolina," and "900+ nuclear bombs detonated in five different states," discussions of press-related advantages of blowing up a portion of the moon, an admiral who refused to believe radiation had contaminated his fleet because he could not feel it, a letter from the Manhattan Project scientists begging the president to cease further H-bomb research, and the story of Stanislav Petrov and an unknown Russian who single-handedly prevented nuclear war on two separate occasions.

"This project started while going through declassified U.S. government documents to find some technical details on the nuclear weapons I was photographing for a different project," Wittig said. "I soon found myself in the midst of a seemingly infinite stack of documents that contained some of the most bizarre and at times plainly unbelievable (formerly) secret stories. I knew that my next project somehow needed to be about these. There was just one major issue: All of it seemed unphotographable."

Wittig said the photography in the exhibit contains a decayed or mutated version of the originals.

"Marks, photos, stamps and artifacts or noise introduced by reproducing something over and over again," he said. "Say you start with a white page, take a page from a book and photocopy it, then photocopy that, then photocopy that. With each iteration it becomes more mutated until it hardly, or not at all, resembles itself. This is very analogous to the process by which radiation mutates DNA and causes cancer and birth defects"

Wittig said that his project documents some of the nation's top help secrets in history, and also serves "simultaneously (as) an exploration of formal notions of beauty and composition put forth by modernist painters like Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and Mondrian.

"The stories aside, I was also fascinated by what these pieces of paper looked like by how an image or text decayed over time not because of UV tradition, but in being reproduced through photocopies and scanning," Wittig said. "Each version imperceptibly mutated from the one before, until its contents are barely legible. The documents themselves, an amalgam of these lines and shapes, what were once photographs and photocopy marks, were beautiful in their own right. So I decided to photograph them."

Wittig also was asked about the aesthetics of the pieces.

"I believe visual artists need to communicate visually," he said. "And so if I just pass out a 90-page memo and be like “can you beleive that” i feel like i’m not really doing my job. And also probably most people wont read the highly technical “ignotion of the armostphere” but this way i get to show a piece of it and we can now have a conversation about how at one point 3 white men decided that their math and physics were trustworthy enough to literally wage the fate of every air-breathing thing on it. Three men! In secret! And thank god they were right, but they made other serious math errors later on.'

According to Wittig's website, he lives in the American southwest desert, where he is working on three nuclear weapons projects. The majority of Wittig's time is spent on an ongoing project called "The Archivist." The project is in its third year and documents the everyday lives of the families he selected.

The photographer is also interested in designing custom cases and spends time working on and driving his beloved Porsche.

Wittig's showcase will run through May 16 at the Leica Gallery in Los Angeles.