Lost
America: The Abandoned Roadside West, by Troy
Paiva
I have been a fan of Troy Paiva's photography
ever since I stumbled onto his Web site a couple of years ago.
His photographs transform what, by day, might look like abandoned
roadside junk into a surreal world of color and surprising insight
into the foibles of human behavior. His new book, Lost America:
The Abandoned Roadside West, is a seductive journey into
the unique world his cameras lenses capture. The color reproduction
of the photographs in the book is beautiful, and it's tempting
to simply look at the pictures and skip the text. This would
be a mistake of gargantuan proportions.
The chapters are replete with evocative remembrances
of the eerie and wondrous moments Paiva has shared with the
so-called empty desert spaces. He describes desert nights
teeming with the sound of fluttering bat wings, the howls
of coyotes, and sounds from unknown sources carried for miles
on never-ending desert breezes. He writes with compassion
and insight about the hundreds of abandoned homestead shacks
found throughout the American southwest. He describes the
growth and eventual death of drive-in movie theaters and provides
a fascinating look into the world of airplane salvage operations.
The most haunting of the chapters is his description
of the development and demise of a resort community in southern
California. In the early 1960's, the town of Salton Sea Beach
was the favored destination of thousands of fishermen and
boaters. A series of human-caused environmental disasters
have turned this one-time recreational paradise into the "fetid
hell of the Salton Sea" where the shoreline is littered
with the skeletons of thousands of fish and the ruins of once-swanky
marinas and clubs.
Although Paiva paints his canvas with the
relics of apparently forgotten and failed human communities,
I found the book a source of hope and appreciation for those
who live and work in harsh desert environments. This visually
stunning and well-written work is a rich source of ideas and
inspiration for western road trippers.
Mark
08/03
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