LA Harbor News

Photographer David Wittig recently unveiled his latest exhibit, marking both a radical departure from his previous work and an organic continuation of its themes. An interplay between traditional form and exploration of the unphotographable, This Page Intentionally Left Blank captures the decaying preservation of composed histories. The photos in the exhibit interweave the beauty of the intentional with the inevitability of decay, through images detailing the bizarre and deadly history of now-declassified secret U.S. government orders.

"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.

Appropriately enough for a project touching on the determinism of historical contingency, Wittig’s interest in declassified government documents began almost by accident.

“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."

Combing through the available records, Wittig found himself faced with historical events that called out for preservation, rebelling against the secrecy in which they were kept. A car-sized hydrogen bomb disappeared off the shores of South Carolina. An admiral refused to believe his fleet had been exposed to radiation because he could not feel or see it. A group of Manhattan Project scientists penned a letter imploring the government to cease all further hydrogen bomb research. Stanislav Petrov, the unknown duty officer at the command center for the Soviet nuclear early-warning system, disobeyed orders and refused to launch a retaliatory attack against the U.S., recognizing a malfunction in the detection system and single-handedly preventing nuclear war, not once but twice. 

These moments confronted Wittig by being at once ideal subjects for his medium and at the same time stubbornly resistant to being photographed.

Yet, it was not only these stories, but the objects in which they were contained, that prompted Wittig’s dialogue with these themes. The material decay of the documents themselves paralleled the enduring yet buried legacy of these events, the shapes formed by the act of censorship outlasting the need for secrecy like radioactive fallout enduring decades after an atomic blast took place. 

One of the pieces in the showcase, U-2 Espionage Trial #1, strikes the viewer with its portrayal of redacted lines of text in a shape reminiscent of the American flag, bringing to full view the way in which the events outlined in these documents are inextricably interwoven into the history of the nation. Wittig recognizes this relationship when he notes that all adults born in the U.S. after the 1950s carry in their teeth benign yet detectable isotopic traces of the more than 900 nuclear tests performed on American soil.

"The stories aside, I was also fascinated by what these pieces of paper looked like," Wittig said. "By how an image or text decayed over time, not because of UV radiation, but in being reproduced through photocopies and scanning. Each version imperceptibly mutated from the one before, until its contents were 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's showcase will run from April 6 until May 16 at the Leica Gallery in Los Angeles.

More information on his work can be found on his website: www.davidwittig.com.