Troy Paiva, San Francisco

Wandering the deserted backroads of the American Southwest, Troy Paiva has explored the abandoned underbelly of America since the 1970s. Since 1989 he’s been taking pictures of it at night, by the light of the full moon. The colored lighting is done with a flashlight or strobe flash masked with theatrical lighting gels. Many of these subjects are already gone; bulldozed, burned down, subdivided, melted for scrap or simply vanished beneath the shifting desert sand. While there are minor digital adjustments to some of the photographs, the lighting effects are all done “in-camera” during the exposure. These images are not Photoshop creations. Troy’s surrealist night photography has been published in two monographs: “Lost America” in 2003 and the award winning “Night Vision” published by Chronicle books in 2008. Both books examine the evolution and eventual abandonment of the communities, structures and social iconography spawned during 20th century America’s western expansion, and the modern Urban Exploration culture that finds strange comfort in dancing through its ruins.