Documentary and its Afterlives: California in Catastrophe examines documentary work in the regional context of California. Built around four case studies of the work of key photographers in the region - including Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, Mike Mandel, Larry Sultan, John Divola and Anthony Hernandez - the dissertation investigates how photography, both materially and allegorically, produces a catastrophic imaginary. Cold War paranoia, the oil crisis of the 1970s, natural disasters and race riots figure in the work and its analysis. Documentary and its Afterlives is an interdisciplinary study, measuring the complexity of documentary work in the 1970s alongside the larger cultural and political terrain of the period, including fiction and film. This is a project dedicated to the weird, the obscure and the comic in documentary practice, all of which has been overlooked by our current histories of documentary taking the East Coast as its frame of reference. The underlying thrust of the dissertation is to show how the artwork's eccentricity and pathos operates as a distinctive mode of social criticism.