Cee Bee's List: photography

Troy Paiva, AKA Lost America, has been creating light painted night photography in abandoned locations and junkyards since 1989. His documentarian, yet surrealist–sometimes playful, sometimes haunting work examines the evolution and eventual abandonment of the communities, infrastructure and social iconography spawned during America’s 20th century expansion into the cities and deserts of the West–and the intensely exhilarating, yet strangely comforting act of sneaking around in the middle of the night, creating art from its ruins.

Over the last twelve years this website has gone viral repeatedly, spawning millions of hits. Troy’s imagery has appeared in print, in over a dozen countries–including three Stephen King book covers–and two award-winning monographs: “Lost America: Night Photography of the abandoned Roadside West“ in 2003 (Motorbooks International), and “Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration” in 2008 (Chronicle Books). Troy’s work has appeared in museums and galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Sweden and San Francisco. In 2010 and 2011 he appeared as a guest judge on the Singapore reality TV show The Big Shot.

" I'm The Associated Press Chief Photographer, Asia. All images ©David Guttenfelder/Associated Press. Thoughts are my own."

Telling stories with pictures, with ephemera and with a few carefully chosen words is what I enjoy doing best. Over the years I have been lucky to create many visual narratives during a varied career as an artist, journalist, curator, art historian and publisher. "View from the Top Floor" brings together some of these stories in a chronicle of my life and the creative world I experienced during the twenty years I lived in the top floor loft at 98 Bowery.

The Bowery from 1969 to 1989 was a low-rent refuge for artists and free spirits willing to tolerate the alcoholics and homeless men who lived on the street. These pages show this vie de bohème as remembered through pictures accumulated at the time. "View from the Top Floor" has no hard and fast rules. It is autobiography and art history. It is a stage for my friends and me. While it does not strive to be complete or objective, it unavoidably takes its place in the bigger world, tracking in part the greater story of art and music in the 1970s and 1980s, an era when culture strove to be more real and expressive, and the East Village and Lower East Side emerged as one of the world's most potent creative centers.

Exploring old photographs and posters to connect with the people who lived, laughed, and loved in years gone by.

Telling stories with pictures, with ephemera and with a few carefully chosen words is what I enjoy doing best. Over the years I have been lucky to create many visual narratives during a varied career as an artist, journalist, curator, art historian and publisher. "View from the Top Floor" brings together some of these stories in a chronicle of my life and the creative world I experienced during the twenty years I lived in the top floor loft at 98 Bowery.

The Bowery from 1969 to 1989 was a low-rent refuge for artists and free spirits willing to tolerate the alcoholics and homeless men who lived on the street. These pages show this vie de bohème as remembered through pictures accumulated at the time. "View from the Top Floor" has no hard and fast rules. It is autobiography and art history. It is a stage for my friends and me. While it does not strive to be complete or objective, it unavoidably takes its place in the bigger world, tracking in part the greater story of art and music in the 1970s and 1980s, an era when culture strove to be more real and expressive, and the East Village and Lower East Side emerged as one of the world's most potent creative centers.

Skinny dipping is the world's most universally recognized erotic social experience. For many, it was our first time being naked outdoors, even our first time being naked with someone else. Our first skinny dip may have been an act of rebellion, perhaps from parents, friends, or simply our own fears. We reassured each other and ourselves with the promise that darkness and water would conceal our naked bodies, when secretly we knew there was plenty of light to see. It was a good excuse to subvert our own fears of being naked together.

Through the 20th century, photographs of nude women were taken by men to be shared with other men. From wartime pinups to Playboy to Pirelli, the power to capture an image corresponded directly with social power. The commercialization of nude and risqué imagery followed two distinct routes: images that were themselves sold, and images that were used to sell something else. The former was porn, the latter advertising.

But today, we are witnessing the blurring of the dichotomy between photographer and subject. The Internet has democratized cultural production in all conceivable media and genres. It should come as no surprise that it has also fundamentally altered the production and exchange of nude imagery, both in practice and intent.

As the camera lens ceases to subjugate as it once did, a third category of nude imagery is emerging that is neither porn nor advertising but social erotica. In this new context, whatever value we ascribe to the nude image can no longer be attributed to its scarcity. Thus, the edit takes on new importance. We are far from being the first to identify social erotica as content worthy of collection, and we owe a debt of gratitude to genre leaders like Project ISM and Synthetic Pubes. If the role of these sites is to collect and catalogue social erotica images, ours is to delve deeper into the experience captured by the images.

Our choice of a calendar as a medium for The Skinny Dipping Report was not entirely innocent. As it happens, 2012 marks the centennial anniversary of Paul Émile Chabas' completion of his painting, Matinée de Septembre (oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art), depicting a nude woman bathing on the shore of Lake Annecy in Haute-Savoie, France. The painting became a national succès de scandale when ordered removed from a New York art dealer's shop window by Anthony Comstock, founder of The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Millions of prints were sold, as well as reproductions on merchandise including umbrellas, suspenders, postcards, candy boxes, cane heads, and watch fobs. The controversy surrounding the painting is credited with helping break down American opposition to the display of nudity in art. The work is also known as the first subject of a nude calendar.

In the century that followed Matinée de Septembre, the nude calendar has become a recognizable form with its own clichés that are ripe for subversion, now more than ever. We aim to upset the form by shifting the dynamic away from objectification and toward identification. Every image in our calendar is of a real person from a real place with a real story. Each image was captured and presented for public consumption on Flickr without any help from us. We merely collected them and worked with their creators to contextualize them. We have selected photographs that make you want to be there (and who wouldn't?), to feel what the person in the photograph is feeling, to understand the particularity of the place and the moment through the lens of skinny dipping.

infra series photorapher in congo

unded in 2008, AMERICAN SUBURB X is an ever-growing archive and fiercely edited look at photography's massively relevant past, dramatically shifting present and always unfolding future. Our mission is to provide and provoke, to educate and titillate those who are obsessed with photography and all of its beautiful moving parts.