Las Vegas | 
 enlarge | Authors: Andreas Schmidt, Text By Christoph Ribbat
Publisher: Hatje Cantz Publishers
Category: Book
List Price: $49.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 850460
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 144
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 11.6 x 9.8 x 0.7
ISBN: 3775715940
Dewey Decimal Number: 770
EAN: 9783775715942
ASIN: 3775715940
Publication Date: July 15, 2005
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Product Description
Flamingo, Stardust, Caesar's Palace--the sparkling neon signs that tower over the grand casinos and hotels on the Las Vegas strip are familiar not just in name but in fame. Las Vegas, that desert town built from sand, poker chips, and free buffets, has come to symbolize a certain kind of American culture that deals in extremes of mediatization, simulacra, privatization, and entertainment. Photographer Andreas Schmidt has taken his lens to the city, altering it in such a way that it appears anew: blurred, seen from a passing car, reversed, or reflected in a window pane. A master of the unexpected and the unusual perspective, Schmidt takes super-wide-angle shots of the spectacular Vegas skyline, sandwiching it into the narrow horizontal gap between two levels of dark concrete pilings in a parking garage. He makes endless hotel corridors vanish into nothingness. He flows vast, empty convention halls and their wildly twilled carpets together to form absurd, magnificent patterns. In Schmidt's Las Vegas series, the glamour and glitter of the strip is exposed as pure fa ade, as the ultimate collective act of megalomania--but without ever losing any of its fascinating, perverse allure.
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http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4829 January 19, 2006
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Las Vegas
by Andreas Schmidt
Las Vegas is a city with a skyrocketing population, one defined by pavement, neon lights and a grandeur that often flirts between extravagant and gaudy. It is a city of paradoxes - a place where the homeless, churchgoers and environmentalists mingle at all hours with gamblers, drinkers and plastic surgeons.
But German-born photographer Andreas Schmidt strips away this sense of glamour and excitement by exposing a frighteningly perfect yet lonely side of this desert-sprung city. His work offers no apologies for this visual analysis but instead seeks to capture a more surreal interpretation.
This collection, therefore, offers no backstage pass to the more illicit side of Vegas. There are no scenes of an old man gambling, a scantily clad woman dancing on a brightly lit stage or a teenager wandering down one of Vegas' many dilapidated streets. Schmidt's work focuses purely on architecture and light.
The focus of his untitled photographs illuminates these quiet and simplistic moments. The idea that Vegas is a city where one's luck can change with the flip of a card, the roll of a dice, is deliberately ignored in his series of photographs. Instead, he highlights the empty spaces, the endless rows of bare hotel corridors - eerily perfect and equally indistinguishable.
There is a jarring, almost unsettling quality to this six-piece hallway series. The passageways appear to stretch forward - without an end insight. The images haunt and linger.
Similarly, a photograph of an empty street suddenly appears strange and unfamiliar without the sight of dozens of rushing cars and pedestrians. The steel panels of the window frame the stillness and highlight a moment of disquieting emptiness in a city that prides itself of never sleeping.
In a collection of endless images of bright lights, dashing cars and interchangeable hallways, a single photograph of a large willow tree becomes a compelling portrait. The neon light of a barely visible sign peeks through its numerous branches, giving it an almost unearthly glow.
Text by Christina Erb.
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