Lisa Barnard

Las Vegas is the most populous city in the state of Nevada with a population of 583,756 in 2010. The publication Learning from Las Vegas is a culmination of a study started in 1968 into the architecture of the Las Vegas commercial strip, particularly exploring the use of the ‘sign’. In the study, Venturi suggests that “this architecture of styles and signs is antispatial; it is an architecture of communication over space; communication dominates space as an element in the architecture and in the landscape.” The sign has now been replaced in Las Vegas by the screen. According to Baudrillard, the world in its entirety has been reduced to a “fantasy of the screen… all our machines are screens… we too are screens…” The pedestrian in Las Vegas is witness to a wider cultural phenomenon where “otherness is virtually squatted by the machine.”

X-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation that carries energy which is absorbed by some substances but not by others. X-ray systems are designed to reveal what is hidden from sight. The waves produced are longer than UV and shorter than gamma waves, and can become apparent on exposed (but not processed) photographic film that of a higher ISO - ‘pushed’ film - or has had multiple exposures to radiation. These images in and around Las Vegas witness multiple trips to Washington, Pakistan, and Las Vegas itself.