Troy Paiva's Night Vision

Troy Paiva's Night Vision

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Bobbie’s Buckeye Bar, Tonopah, NV

I came across Troy Paiva’s Night Vision work last night, and was impressed by the sheer quantity of it. Then I delved into the images themselves and got tingles on the back of my neck. Paiva shoots in abandoned spaces in the American desert, and he finds some truly bizarre haunts. I found an excellent interview on Ballardian with Paiva which discusses his inspirations and methods and everything else. How Paiva got started with this work:

“In 1989 I was working as a designer/illustrator for a major toy
company, drawing and painting every day in a heavily art-directed
environment. After several years of that I lost any sense of the
artistic fulfillment I was originally getting from the job. The last
thing I wanted to do was draw and paint at home too, so I was desperate
to find a new personal creative outlet. At the time my brother Tom was
a full time photography student at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
One of his classes was in night photography. Being my brother, he knew
I’d be fascinated by night shooting on a conceptual level, so he snuck
me along to some lectures and shoots with the class in the decaying
industrial sections of SF. It instantly dawned on me that this was the
perfect way to photograph the abandoned roadside towns I was already
exploring. After one trip to the desert to shoot at night I became
totally obsessed and consumed by it.”

Paiva has a book of this work coming out in July on Chronicle Editions; you can pre-order it here. See the full interview with him here, and see the flickr set here.

Sorry, now you have no day left.

I think my favorite set of Paiva’s is Abandoned Whorehouse. Paiva’s captions complement the spookiness well:

“Bobbie’s Buckeye Bar, Tonopah, NV. Abandoned bar and whorehouse. Shot
summer 2004, 35mm film. Abandoned for about a year before I found it
(judging by the expired liquor license), the place was unlocked and
wide open that day, but on my last trip to Tonopah it was locked up
tight. No idea if it has been vandalized or ransacked.”

I generally don’t like gels, but somehow the greens and reds complement these images. They feel like Kubrick.

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Whorehouse art collection. Bobbie’s Buckeye Bar, Tonopah, NV.

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Living-room inside the Madam’s home attached to Bobbie’s Buckeye Bar, Tonopah, NV.

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The tiny office inside the Madam’s home attached to Bobbie’s Buckeye
Bar, Tonopah, NV. Shot July 2004, 35mm
film. Green flash.

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Heart-shaped tub complete with Jack-o-lantern inside the Madam’s home attached to Bobbie’s Buckeye Bar, Tonopah, NV. Red Flash.

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Dead and desicated Siamese cat inside the Madam’s home attached to
Bobbie’s Buckeye Bar. Did
the Madam go into hospital and leave her kitty to starve? Shot July
2004, 35mm film. Green flash and flashlight.

Abandoned Whorehouses and dead kitties seem dangerous! What do you think about that, Troy?

“I don’t really worry about stuff very much. I have yet to see a ghost
or the undead, although I’ve had thousands of weird experiences. I’ve
shot in many supposedly haunted locations and seen and heard things
that some people would pass off as paranormal, but nothing that
couldn’t be attributed to wind, settling or vermin in the walls. What I
have seen a lot of are big poisonous spiders, three-storey drop offs
into the yawning darkness with no railings, copper thieves,
rattlesnakes, rotten floors and wasted teenage vandals. I’ve come out
of buildings crawling with spiders (I’ve had some very bad spider bites
over the years), missed a rattlesnake bite by inches and been chased
back to the car by a pack of wild dogs. I’ve been run off by crazy,
desert-rat property owners racking shotguns. I’ve been swarmed by a
heavily armed platoon of border agents in southern Arizona while I was
shooting in a pet cemetery. I’ve had countless cuts and bruises and
sprained and twisted ankles, and I once gave myself an excruciating
second-degree burn while light painting with fireworks in a sandstorm.”

woot.

UPDATE: I’ve now been looking at these images all day. This is one of the creepiest/awesomest pictures I’ve ever seen:

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Inside the sick bay aboard the S.S. Independence ghost ship.
Completely dark room, natural LED flashlight.

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