Lost America: The Abandoned Roadside West

by Troy Paiva, Stan Ridgway

Release Date: June, 2003

Edition: Paperback

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Can't wait for part II...

I have been a fan of lostamerica.com for a long time. The night photography is just incredible! What took me by suprise in "Lost America: The Abandoned Roadside West" is the wonderful, descriptive, passages that author Troy Paiva has included describing his 100 mph journeys thru the Lost America. Not only is Paviva an expert photographer, (these photos are beyond description, you must see them) he is an artist with his words. You almost can feel the desert heat, the sand filled wind against your face...Just a wonderful reading experience. I hope a part II is in the works!

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.