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.

Andreas Schmidt strips away the 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.

Schmidt has worked on the Las Vegas series for the last six years, and selected photographs from this body of work have been exhibited in New York and Bristol. In February/March 2004 a selection of the Las Vegas images were shown at “Built”, an exhibition at Scout Gallery London, and In 2005 German art book publisher Hatje Cantz published his first monograph entitled ‘Las Vegas‘ to great critical acclaim.

	"Untitled" Las Vegas
	Signed Edition: 25 Prints

	"Untitled" Las Vegas
	Signed Edition: 25 Prints

	"Untitled" Las Vegas
	Signed Edition: 25 Prints