Phoenix photographer Steve Weiss has taken his obsession with a lens-eye view of the world to an unusual business- scouting locations for films and advertising shots. When he is engaged in driving around Arizona searching out the right background for a commercial or a movie scene, he usually uses a digital camera to record and send location views quickly to his clients. On his own time, he prefers to take a different route.
Weiss’ personal ride has taken him to Las Vegas at least once a year for the last two decades, and when he shoots in that town, Steve goes old school with a film camera. The prints are sometimes digitalized on a super high-resolution scanner, and turned into C-prints, but he likes to start with the richness of analog photography, and claims that the results of even the best digital cameras “have holes in them.”
The old camera is a good fit with the Nevada project: Lost Vegas. That Las Vegas is a gold mine of kitsch is cliché; Weiss’ photos fortunately avoid the obvious responses. A close-up of a hotel telephone seems to recall frames of ringing phones in countless noir thrillers not by resemblance, but in contrast. Seen straight on, it appears to be a component in an assemblage or art installation fixated on memory. The figure on the billboard surrounded by silver dollars makes a more ominous comment. The too-dark suntan, bug-eyes and gleaming teeth look like the infamous Sambo of race advertising. As contorted as the image is, an early morning stroll through the slot machine arcades of any low stakes casino will reveal more than one face held in a thousand yard stare, looking, for all the world, as if it was not seeing but only hearing the whirring numbers in the box. But it’s a nice photo, with not only nostalgia, but compassion, too. Perhaps condemnation—an easy response—is lacking because Weiss is a Westerner, in fact “a Phoenix native of the worst kind, the kind that prattles on endlessly about the good old days when there was nothing North of Camelback Road and folks rode horseback through the neighborhood on the way to the desert.” Though the subject is kitsch, the photographs hold it close, like something precious.
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