Street Photography in Vegas: A Study in Abundance

A city defined by abundance.

To visit a place that doesn’t care about you, where you’re money, a consumer, and a gambler—it doesn’t sit well, doesn’t feel good. But it’s also a reminder of the immensity of the place you live, and all the wanting and neediness and loneliness and pining for your home country.

Its overpriced coffee and strip club men, cheap champagne for breakfast, and afternoon grab-assing in the blaze of the place. Walking, seeing them—not judging, just seeing this land of wanting, this desert, hoping for darkness. It’s like a set in the daytime, ready for the show to start but awkward and propped up, horny for the energy of “sin” and naughtiness to set into motion its various cogs and wheels.

You think about the workers, tying on their aprons and slipping into non-slip shoes, pulling their hair back into ponytails or brushing it straight or back in front of the bathroom mirror a few minutes before the evening shift starts. It’s 3 p.m., and it’s the beginning of the workday—3 to midnight or sometimes 1 a.m., then the bus back home.

What’s it like in the tourism industry at this volume? Streams and throngs and slithering tongues of people, all their beating hearts and moods and personal stories, needing from you something you have: steak, extra ketchup, Prosecco, dollar bills, Kahlua, vodka, more time with the menu, payout from a machine. Without question, the worker gives it to them. To us.

I’m shifting through the city like a vagrant. I could curl up in a ball and sleep in this doorway too. I could live here on purpose or by accident, losing all of my money and having no place to go. All alone in the world, more or less, except for a few friends out east, some family in the west I don’t talk to much. Then I’m here too, a candy-black shadow on the sidewalk, which in the breeze—which slides through seldomly like sage—I can see, the flat blue needle, and I’m inhaling its scent like a flower’s.

I get to the general store and look around under the fluorescent lights for anything meaningful, but it’s just earth trash. I just can’t be negative too much anymore. It’s hurtful to judge, but also, I do. I say, this is all cheap, but to someone else, it’s a dream to come to a place with so much much-ness.

Abundance! Over-saturation! Buildings are bigger and taller than they need to be. Neon lights throb in bright sunshine. LED screens screaming with ads for shows and performers bending their bodies in unnatural ways, and almost-forgotten singers revived on the illuminated screens.

“Wealth” can also be seen in the quantity of things and non-things—shot glasses in a discount bargain store, pins and rings in an antique shop, hotels, casinos and cocktail menus. It’s also how many businesses you have and employees you employ.

But what is abundance really? It isn’t this. It’s inward-facing. It’s what you actually have already and what you have to give. That spirit—that’s often missing, I think, in the industrial exchange. I have this. Do you have that? Could we barter more? Seeing to it that we deliver, however small, some genuine fragment of ourselves?