Las Vegas

Although I have neglected my studies badly in the past few months, I did not stop taking pictures or trying to use my camera to explore and comment on the world I find around me.  Recently I have been traveling quite a bit, a week in Las Vegas was followed a week later by a week in Singapore. Whilst Singapore was a blend of work and pleasure, Las Vegas was simply work.  I needed to be in an all day meeting on Friday the 22nd February in Palo Alto, just south of San Francisco.  I planned to spend the earlier part of the week in the valley, hopefully meeting my boss of two years for the first time.  Unfortunately my organization was spending that week in Las Vegas where we were organizing the annual HP Partner event.  So, rather than a week in California, Nevada became my destination.

I was quite excited about this, I have been to Vegas before, but not armed with a camera and intent.  My plan was to use my spare time to image this crazy city.  What spare time.  I arrived in Vegas after a 20 hour journey (not the easiest place to get to from Munich) and settled into a routine of work and sleep, the only breaks were to grab some food and one late night foray to a local drug store after my reading glasses broke. My bosses boss, a quite senior VP, was going to have to present our strategy and progress to Meg Whitman, CEO of HP, and yours truly was responsible for much of the content.  The end result was precious little time to take photographs, although as events transpired there were other reasons for my lack of photography.

As I progress with the OCA I begin to realize that my job and my studies cannot be easily separated.  In a sense this is a further realization that documentary photography is a subjective activity, one that must feed upon the photographers own viewpoint and life experiences.  I cannot easily document my work, firstly it is not terribly interesting, secondly doing so would probably get me fired.  However, I can take advantage of the opportunities it brings and in particular travel.  My current role does not call for too much travel, just a couple of times a year, once upon a time I would be making up to 10 long haul trips a year.  I miss it a little, but on the whole am happy to keep my feet on the ground these days.

The first photograph from my trip to Vegas is a scene familiar to many travelers, early morning and my ride to New York sits at the gate waiting for departure.  The winter sun was just burning off the morning fog and the airport slowly came into view.  The reflections in the window add to the sense of this being the beginning of a journey rather than an aviation shot, look closely and I am reflected in the left side.

Roughly 20 hours later, this is the arrivals hall at McCarren International airport, welcome to America and please take care that no one shoots you.  Heidi is a US citizen and I work for a US corporation.  I could move to the USA pretty much any time I wanted. This, of all aspects of of American culture, keeps me away.  I find it hard to understand with even the most cultured people having this desire to own and use deadly weapons.  I grew up in the countryside, even working for a gun club, launching clay pigeons on the weekend for shooting competitions, so have been around guns, but machine guns?  This photograph is also a statement of style for me.  I do not find photographing people very interesting, not difficult, just not very compelling.  What I find interests me are the signs around us that point to the culture we live in.  This is a pretty obvious statement, but it says far more about modern US culture and the challenges of that society than would any other photo I could have taken in the airport.  I very deliberately pushed the advert to the right to allow the option of an exit from this twisted world.

As I mentioned earlier, I did not get to see much more of Las Vegas than this, 14 hours a day at this tiny desk wedged between the two beds in my room, a fairly typical setup. Waking at around midnight or shortly after, I work through the night, fueled by Starbucks (very conveniently located just next to the lift in my hotel).  At around 6-7am my boss would come on line for a quick chat and then I would work until 6pm or as late as I could before sleep became a necessity once more.  It sounds a lot worse than it is, I like my work and the pressure is kind of fun, it pays for my goodies.  All I ask for is that hotels would put in desks at a height that is consistent with the chairs they provide, I enjoy carpal tunnel just as much as the next man.

The first night I was there, I had no choice than to make a foray into the night.  On the flight across my reading glasses had broke and whilst I do not normally need them I cannot work from a laptop screen without them.  At home I have a nice big monitor and a decent working distance.  The web showed an all night Walgreen roughly a half a mile away down the strip.  This gave me a chance to take some nighttime shots of the city and test the high ISO capability of my new Olympus EM5, quite happy with the results:

But, what a ridiculous place.  This was a short walk in which I met more prostitutes than in my time so far, wearing very little given  how cold it was.  I suspect they were more interested in a warm room than my money by this stage.  Going for a walk at 3am in Las Vegas is not for the faint hearted.  I did not do it again, a decision given further impetus by a multiple shooting and murder a day later on one of the junctions I had to cross that night.  Seems the world of rap is still not at peace.

The result was that most of my photographs were taken from within the safety of my hotel room:

One aspect of Las Vegas that I knew in advance I would not easily be able to capture was the gambling, I do not think the casinos would be happy with me wandering around taking photographs.  I also felt sorry for the poor souls on the casino floor.  No matter what time of night I emerged people were sitting at slot machines mechanistically pulling the lever hoping for that miracle of instant wealth.  Most were late middle ages to quite senior, most massively overweight and many in wheel chairs.  They would have made interesting portraits, but it would have been exploitation as well as probably getting me thrown out of the hotel.

I did get a chance to photograph the gaming machines, in the airport!  There truly is no escape in Las Vegas from the urge to gamble.  I am a mathematical physicist by training a science that is ultimately all about probabilities.  I never gamble, except on lost causes such as the lottery - I know I will lose, many of the people I saw in Vegas did not have that belief, they were going to win  For the losers (and that is almost everyone) the airport is the last chance to turn it around, or rather to spend the very last cent left.  This is the horror of Vegas, the exploitation of the weak and elderly, people with limited income, to further fund the rich and powerful.

Vegas was not what I had hoped for, but it was still a visually interesting place and one that I managed to spend some time looking at with my camera.  The airport provided the best material in the end, perhaps becuase this was the only place in which I was unable to do any work.

Over the years I have made many business trips, usually with a camera, and have many similar images that I have collected, views of airports, out my window, shots of my workspace and sometimes colleagues.  A project that has sprung to mind is to mine this archive and use it to look back at myself...