Off the Strip

The first time I went to Las Vegas I did the obvious thing: stood in the middle of the Strip at night and just looked. The casinos stacked against each other like competing hallucinations, every surface throwing light at you, the whole city organized around the logic that if you can see it you might spend money near it. It works. Even knowing how it works, it works.

Then you take one wrong turn—one block off the main drag—and the spell breaks fast. The towers of light don’t disappear, they just recede, and you’re standing in something that looks like any other American city where money chose not to go. The people who keep those casinos running go home somewhere after their shifts, and that somewhere isn’t on any postcard. The city’s entire aesthetic project is about concealing that fact.

Brooke Olimpieri grew up in Nevada and made a photo book called Lost Vegas that shows the city without the concealment. Quick weddings, women working, men with money, a lot of bare skin and fluorescent light. She describes her relationship to the place with something that sounds almost like love: I love Vegas because it offers endless possibilities. I just can’t get enough of those dirty motels with their pink and teal-tiled bathrooms. That’s not ironic—or if it is, it’s the kind that tips back into genuine affection. She knows Las Vegas the way you only know a place you grew up inside, wanting out.

Lost Vegas is published by Imperial Publishing. It’s the kind of document cities like this almost require—someone has to photograph what lies underneath the choreography, and it might as well be someone who still feels something for it.