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Under Pressure – The Personal Side of Lost Americana

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Under Pressure – The Personal Side of Lost Americana

My biggest fear is that everything I have done over the last 25 years will fall to the wayside like so many of the places I photograph. 

2019 Has To Be A Make It Year.

Back in 1998 I was about to graduate from college with my BA in photojournalism and a class project that I started two years previous had accumulated enough images and become known well enough amongst my classmates that most people, including a few of my professors, all suggested that it needed to be in a book. Being the type of person that sets up long and short term goals, I made a deal with myself that in 10 years, I’d have enough material and I’d be able to get that book together. That time obviously came and went.

What happened in between isn’t super important. I worked a few different 9-5 jobs, struggled like so many artists do starting off, but I still kept spending my vacation time driving across rural America, photographing Lost Americana as I saw it and eventually started to share my work on a new Internet platform called Facebook. After the birth of our first child I had a brief hiatus from 2009-2011, but starting in 2014, even with a second child who was only one, I knew I needed to seriously get back on that road to Lost Americana and complete the biggest promise I ever made to myself. That one day Lost Americana would be a book.

So, here I am promising myself and now the thousands of people who follow me across the world, that whether it’s 100 copies, or 100,000 copies there will be a Lost Americana book, packed with unseen photos, stories of rural America, and facts about what has happened as small farming towns have shrunk, in the works by the end of 2019.

The pressure is on. A deadline has been set.

Now my only request is can I put a little pressure on you? Will you spread the word, tell your friends? Because the more people who follow Lost Americana across social media, and subscribe to the email newsletter, that’s more people that potential publishers will see as an audience for this book and every 10, 100, or 1,000 more people will potentially help to get this book onto shelves across the country and who knows maybe across the world.

Thank you,

Vincent D. Johnson

The last (2008) Lost Americana trip I took before 2014. Notice, no kids.
Kids be damned! Despite have a 1-year old & a 5-year old, both that had never so much as camped out in the back yard, I took them both on a 12 day cross country trip to photograph Lost Americana. The first major trip since 2008.