Andreas Schmidt

Flamingo, Stardust, Caesar's Palace - the towering neon signs above the grand casinos and hotels along the strip also appear in the brilliant Las Vegas photos by Andreas Schmidt (born in 1967), but the images are altered - blurred, shot from a passing car, reversed, or reflected in a window pane. Schmidt is a master of the unexpected twist, the unusual perspective: a super-wide-angle shot sandwiches the spectacular panorama of the Las Vegas skyline into the narrow horizontal gap between two levels of dark concrete in a parking garage, endless hotel corridors vanish into nothingness, and vast, still-empty convention halls and carpets flow together to form absurd, magnificent patterns. The glamour and glitter of the strip is exposed in Schmidt's pictures as pure façade, as the ultimate megalomania - yet it loses none of its fascinating allure.