Lost America: The Abandoned Roadside West [Paperback]

Troy Paiva (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 13, 2003

A stunningly photographed examination of the roadside icons that dot America's landscape. Lost America celebrates the boom-to-bust towns, aircraft bone yards, and filling stations of days past that were sacrificed at the altars of speed and technology and relegated to windswept desert plains and abandoned fields. The eye-catching and memorable photography is complemented with a succinct text history that details the rise and fall of each subject. The result is an impressive tour of an America still standing, yet largely forgotten.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: MBI (July 13, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 076031490X
• ISBN-13: 978-0760314906
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 8.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #906,102 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting, Riveting Images of Abandoned Popular Culture., November 25, 2003

By 

mirasreviews (McLean, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Lost America: The Abandoned Roadside West (Paperback)

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.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Round about midnight., October 29, 2003

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lost America: The Abandoned Roadside West (Paperback)

As you would expected the mechanical detritus of America is a bit of a magnet for photographers. Who can pass up taking shots of abandoned vehicles, filling stations and other commercial buildings that seem to be scattered along the tarmac of the Nation, especially if they are surrounded by an empty landscape. Not Troy Paiva for sure but he takes the idea a step further by capturing all this stuff after dark and he does a super job.

Not content with taking these photos at night he adds a neat touch by using different colored lights to illuminate the scene. So now the ordinary abandoned filling station becomes the extraordinary abandoned station with red walls, green and purple canopies against a dark blue sky (Ludlow on Route 66, page forty-seven) or part of a pick-up truck with a magenta cab leaning against a junked interstate highway sign (Sacramento, page 110) The four chapters in the book are full of these intriguing photos. The best ones, I think, are in Salvage where you can see some knockout images of old jet planes, slowly being cut up for scrap.

As well as great photos, Troy Paiva writes interesting captions to all the photos, rather unusual for a photo book, so many photographers seem to think that just the name of the location and the year is all that is required. He also contributes four worthwhile essays to each chapter filling out the historical detail of what is now discarded.

So why *** stars? It's because the book's production really does not do justice to these photos. The publisher mostly produce transport books not art books and the layout would be fine if it was dealing with trains, for instance, where the photos and artwork would come from a variety of sources. I feel `Lost America' deserves a more formal treatment, with each page having one centered image and caption and the text not mixed up with the photos. Also there is far too much white space, none of the photos are whole page or on black pages for a change of pace. If Paiva carries on taking his night shots perhaps another publisher will produce a book that shows of his work to better effect.

BTW: You can see all these photos (on a handsome black screen) and more on Troy's website, just put his name into Google. Here's a bit of advice though, don't click on his LINKS unless you have a few hours to spare, it is the most awesome list of visual Americana sites you'll find anywhere. All free too!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lost America Rules!!, June 12, 2003

By 

Dave Tilbor (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lost America: The Abandoned Roadside West (Paperback)

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.