UNLIMITED

The Threepenny Review

Vegas Neon

Motel Vegas by Fred Sigman. Smallworks Press, 2019, $29.99 cloth.

IT’S TO be expected. You take photographs in order to document things—Paris in the case of Eugène Atget in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the shacks of the American south in the case of Walker Evans in the 1930s—and these documents then acquire a quality of elegy. What is extraordinary is the speed with which this happens, the brevity of the “then.” As soon as the images emerge in the developing tray—even, conceivably, the moment the shutter is clicked—they are imbued with how they will be seen in the future.

The photographs in Fred Sigman’s book were commissioned in the mid-1990s in order to record the signage of once-thriving motels on Fremont Street

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Threepenny Review

The Threepenny Review1 min read
Thanks to Our Donors
The Threepenny Review is supported by Hunter College, the Bernard Osher Foundation, Campizondo Foundation, Mad Rose Foundation, and the George Lichter Family Fund. Our writer payments are underwritten by our Writers’ Circle, which includes Robert Bau
The Threepenny Review1 min read
The Clothes Horse
violates our good sense of what a self-respecting horse should look like. Distinct from its forebears, The Clothes Horse is uninterested in sugar cubes, passenger transportation, racetrack whippings, or war—except for the costumes: metal corsets stud
The Threepenny Review2 min read
A Note On The Artworks
When Heinrich Zille (1858–1929) began displaying his work in 1901, it showed a side of Berlin not previously captured in art. Zille turned his attention away from the capital's architectural showpieces—the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate—and document

Related Books & Audiobooks