Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #309937 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Customer Reviews

Haunting, Riveting Images of Abandoned Popular Culture.
After years of admiring Troy Paiva's photography on his website, I was thrilled to find that a collection of his unique images is finally available in print. For those unfamiliar with Paiva's work, he takes color pictures of long-abandoned buildings and machines at night, under moonlight, and provides additional illumination with splashes of brightly colored flash. If that sounds gaudy or just plain odd, it probably is. And although I'm normally a fan of subdued colors and black-and-white photography, Troy Paiva's work has always captivated me. A lot of photographers take pictures of decay. And taken under sunlight by any other photographer, that's what these images would look like. But decay is only part of the story. Troy Paiva had a stroke of genius when he determined that darkness and garish color would turn his images of junk into vital accounts of American technologies and ideas whose life cycle has been spent. His lighting techniques make the structures seem haunted. Not by ghosts, but by cultures long departed. Ugly things are made eerily riveting, if not actually beautiful.

"Lost America" contains five sections: "Where the Lanes Are Wide" (photographs of abandoned Miracle Mile towns), "Drive In, Drive Out" (you guessed it, drive-in movie theaters), "The Last Resort" (The Salton Sea), and "Salvage" (machines with one foot in the grave). Troy Paiva introduces each section with an excellent essay detailing the history of the subject and its demise. The essays are fluid and informative. Mr. Paiva turns out to be one of those photographers who writes the text for his photographs better than anyone else could. There are about 90 5"x7 1/2" color photographs in this book, all with explanatory captions, and some smaller black-and-white photographs as well. I have really enjoyed looking at these images over and over again. My only misgiving about the book is that I wish it were hardcover and perhaps a little larger. Nevertheless, no fan or practitioner of photography should be without Troy Paiva's haunting historic images. Aficionados of 20th Century popular culture may also find "Lost America" valuable for its graphic representation of how cultures and their icons came and then passed into oblivion. Highly recommended.

Lost America Rules!!
I've been a fan of Troy Paiva's night photography for years. It's ethereal, it's mysterious, it's almost supernatural. The Abandoned Roadside West is his recurrent theme: ghost towns, derelict drive-ins and motels, airplane graveyards, and other places in our own country that we would never otherwise see, or even guess at their existence.

How does he do it? He works at it. Over the years he developed his own system of long-exposure night photography that uses strategically placed colored strobes to light the most unusual and out-of-the-way locales imaginable, which he researches and tracks down during week-long expeditions through the forgotten desert highways of the West in his trusty Subaru SUV.

Paiva, a former toy designer, is like no one else. He possesses a sardonic view of the world and a maniacal sense of humor. His esthetic is informed by kitsch, camp, television, toys, modern architecture, the pop culture of the fifties and sixties, and his extensive formal training in design and technology. How this mixture of traits and influences yields such hauntingly beautiful images is a mystery you will want to check out.

Fabulous Photographs
A beautiful but sad look at abandoned and forgotten scenes in America. The lighting and the timing of the photographs makes this a very unique and delightful book. Clearly a lot of thought went into capturing these images. It's a sad commentary, in some ways, of human nature. When we tire of something, we just toss it by the wayside in favor of something new.