Casey Kaplan
Las Vegas as you’ve never seen it before: photographer Jeff Burton dives into the heart of the city of boundless desire
By Thibaut Wychowanok
A famous fashion photographer who made his debut on gay porn shoots, American Jeff Burton was invited by Louis Vuitton to take a look at the incandescent and disturbing Vegas. These shots form a dazzling impressionist journey through the city’s buildings and famous shows (from the ultra-violent fights of Ultimate Fighting to the poetry of Cirque du Soeil). Between expressionist painting and voyeurism à la Brian de Palma, the resulting book (edited by Patrick Remy) is one of the finest successes in Louis Vuitton’s Fashion Eye collection of fine books.
Thibaut Wychowanok: Your book on Las Vegas opens with three almost abstract pictures, in which one can make out an aquatic presence among a torrent of visual effects. It feels like you have experienced Las Vegas through sensations and colors above all, rather than through precise places that you would have wanted to document.
Jeff Burton: When I scouted the shoot, I chose to stay on the 50th floor of the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Funnily enough, I quit smoking 34 days ago, but when I shot this, I was a heavy smoker and this room had a balcony. So that was part of the decision process, a little bit selfish, but I also thought it’d be amazing to be that high off the ground with no obstruction, no glass, and to be free to shoot in so many different ways. What you see in the first pictures are the Bellagio fountains. It was pretty amazing… floating. It feels like you’re floating up there, on the 50th floor over the city, kind of flying. The fountain was the most spectacular thing to look at from that angle. It kind of looks like outer space or as if it is isolated from the rest of the situation. It really drew you in. It was hypnotic. That was the first thing I started shooting. The edit of the book is in chronological order because it seems to make sense to me, to go through it as I experienced it. It also made sense to me narratively. Arriving, being attracted to what you are attracted to and going on to the next phase. Almost like I was docking into a space. I was really responding to sensation, color and beauty.
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