Photo essay Photojournalism

The magazine of the photo-essay

Nov 2017 back issue

“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!” Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker

by Jay Wolke

When I made these photographs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Las Vegas and Atlantic City were the centers for legal gambling in the United States. Devoted to games, spectacles, and temporary diversions of all kinds and representing the ultimate immoderacies of American consumerism, these cities were designed to be architectural seductions, tapping the collective thirst for risk and reward. Still under the influence of underworld kingpins, Las Vegas was fueling the needs of dream-seekers while utilizing a huge infrastructure of resources and hundreds of thousands of workers. It was the fastest growing city in the country. Atlantic City was trading its worn out, seaside image for modern gambling and convention complexes, displacing thousands of local residents in the process and hoping to turn around the fortunes of the city and the state. Especially appealing to me were the peripheral associations, which enriched an already complex, social, and physical structure—i.e., celebrities, prizefights, prostitution, beauty pageants, weddings, and so on. As a photographer, I was fascinated with the accentuated layers and intersections of people, artifice, architecture, and landscape. I was searching for circumstances charged with expectation and aspiration, stirred by fantasy so that, through my photographs, I might then strip away those expectations, exposing the symbols of desire alongside the realities of pretense and uncertainty. In doing so I was hoping to construct images of visual and psychological tension, mirroring the complex processes that contrast imagination and reality. This volume is both a time capsule and an index of the contemporary, addressing themes that are every bit as acute today as they were when I made the images decades ago. Revisiting my archive of negatives now has necessarily suggested a different appreciation of the photographs; many, originally ignored or rejected have found their way back into the body of the project, and now command a new edit. This process of reconsideration and reflection has been extremely rewarding on many levels. Both hindsight and experience have given me fresh angles from which to view this work and to finally reveal the story that I’d always hoped to tell.