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“Paolini's many photos [are] artfully arranged into collages that
offer juxtapositions that really capture the energy of the town.”
— Richard Abowitz
Los Angeles Times |
BOOK REVIEW
By M.A. Duval
We're all familiar with the type: the European who comes to this country to
examine modern America and its inhabitants with the intention of telling the
folks back home what it all really “means.” These visitors tend to
come in two varieties.
First, there are the gimlet-eyed social theorists and deconstructors—people
like Jean Baudrillard, whose 1986 book America pretty much set the standard for
zoological musings on the state of American otherness. For them, America is the
bleakness and desperation of modern civilization boiled down to its essence, a
last, decadent flowering of culture to wave at as we all slide into the abyss.
Then, I'm happy to say, there are people like François Paolini, whose new
book of photographs, We All Live in Vegas, has just been published by Stephens
Press. For Paolini, America in general—and Las Vegas in particular—is a
beautiful conundrum, a shimmering blast of color and outsized ambition that is
exciting and visceral and open to infinite interpretation. Through his eyes, Las
Vegas is not only the city of endless possibilities and can-you-top-this
spectacle; it's also the greatest, most compelling example of America's limitless
talent for reinvention.
Can you blame me for preferring François Paolini's version of America?
To say that the photographs in We All Live in Vegas are as dazzling as
the city they portray doesn't do justice to their movement, vibrancy, and
more-than-just-surface appeal. Paolini is an award-winning, world-renowned
photojournalist, and he has a documentarian's eye for images captured just so,
in ways that make you want to take a second and third look. Alfred Stieglitz said
that “In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real
than reality,” and Paolini's pictures do more than just elicit this
meta-reality from his subjects, they nudge out something essential and primary
from the strip stores, parade goers, and monumental buildings they portray,
something that might be called “tincture of Las Vegas.”
Yet, therešs nothing forlorn or “heart of darkness” about We All
Live in Vegas—Paolini is at core an optimist. As the dual English-French
chapter introductions in the book make clear, “If Paolini feels at home in
Las Vegas, it's because it offers the possibility to create a world in which man
raises his eyes to the gods instead of keeping them fixed on the asphalt.”
Heady language, yes, but when you consider the mixture of grandiloquence and
beautiful ordinariness in Paolini's photographs, also very appropriate. The
people in We All Live in Vegas may be dwarfed by the titanic hotels and
casinos they walk among—the Luxor, Caesar's Palace, et al.—but never
are they made insignificant. In many pictures, Paolini stretches the frame to
show the plain shops, the hair salons, tux rental places, and appliance emporiums
that are as much a part of the city as the MGM Grand. Las Vegas, for Paolini,
isn't just a place for tourists, quickie weddings, and red-eyed gambling jags;
it's also a piece of art in itself. In We All Live in Vegas, the city
shines just as brightly and with just as much color under clear desert daylight
as it does when the neon is switched on at night.
Best of all, in contrast to the Spartan look and staid layout of many photography
books, We All Live in Vegas is a triumph of composition and design.
Pictures often bleed into each other at complementary angles: canted columns lead
into the straight up and down of a casino sign; the pink of a wall becomes the
red-orange of a neon sconce; a page of separate images blurs in the eye to become
one pinwheel of color. At other times, Paolini emphasizes a photograph by framing
it—literally. Or he'll fill a page with rectangular pictures to juxtapose
the squareness of one building with the roundness of another. It's marvelous to
see a photography book done right.
In the end, We All Live in Vegas is a terrific rebuttal to the gaggle of
Old (and New) World artists and thinkers who hold their noses when they speak of
America. François Paolini's gorgeously complex vision of one of America's
jewel cities says to all naysayers, “Look closer. This is the future. It
can be glorious!”
And that's a good thing. Because, after all, it may be François Paolini's
Vegas, but we all have to live in it.
We All Live in Vegas is available from local bookstores, at online
retailers, and directly from
www.weallliveinvegascom or
www.stephenspress.com.
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