Top photographer focusing on Las Vegas

Friday, Dec. 22, 2000 | 9:46 a.m.

Sitting in the VIP room at the Venetian, photographer Gideon Lewin leaned forward and looked at the glass that separates the quiet room from the hotel's expansive hallway.

He tried to decipher the wandering cluster of women muddled in the hallway from the reflection of tourists outside waiting for cabs.

"It's a very interesting mix of people," he said. "It's somewhat surrealistic. People are totally transplanted. They could be on Mars."

The New York-based fashion photographer, whose work has appeared in Elle, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, has recently taken up part-time residency in Las Vegas, where he has been working on a spring ad campaign for the Venetian.

"I always like a challenge," Lewin said between photo shoots. "Venice has mystique. And this," he paused and smiled, "is Venice in Nevada. I'm trying to make it as mysterious, appealing and romantic as in Italy."

The project includes promoting the arrival of the Hermitage-Guggenheim museum, scheduled to open in the spring of 2001. Lewin said he plans to continue his work in Las Vegas, and is gradually setting up a base here.

"My mission is to upgrade (the advertising)," he said. "There's a conformity to a certain standard here, which I'd like to break. The image of Las Vegas needs to be more sophisticated."

The Guggenheim will add another dimension to Las Vegas, Lewin said. "It's going to create a real art center."

Lewin worked 16 years for fashion designer Richard Avedon before establishing his own studio in New York City. Lewin's resume includes work with designers such as Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta and Joanna Mastroianni.

He's photographed such personalities as writer Elie Weisel, actress Isabella Rossellini and caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.

Recently he photographed various ways of presenting fois gras for Michael Ginor's cookbook "Foie Gras a Passion" and did the photo work for fashion designer Bob Mackie's book "Unmistakably Mackie: The Fashion and Fantasy of Bob Mackie." Ginor is co-founder, owner and president of Hudson Valley Foie Gras and New York State Foie Gras. Both books were published last year.

Earlier this year Lewin took on a new venture by exhibiting his creative works at the Neuhoff Gallery in New York and at Musee de la Photographie in Mougins, France.

The exhibit in Mougins was a retrospective that included his work from the past 35 years. In addition to his fashion photographs, it included portraits of celebrities and personalities, from violinist Itzhak Perlman to Clint Eastwood. Street scenes from a 1965 flea market in Paris were also part of the exhibit.

Lewin's photographs of nude bodies in motion, a 15-year effort, have been featured at Musee de la Photographie and the Neuhoff Gallery. The inspiration for the black-and-white photographs, taken with moving lights and a moving camera, formed at a fashion shoot for Vogue magazine in the 1980s.

"I'm obsessed with motion," Lewin said. "In photography everything is frozen. This was a way of trying to illustrate before, during and after what happened in motion.

"I've always been obsessed with bodies. Everything inside us is in motion. Our blood moves. Our heart beats. The universe is in motion. So this was a natural thing for me to think through."

The exhibits were a first for Lewin.

"It's time," he said. "I've kept everything to myself for years. It's a big step. Maybe I'll start a new book, a retrospective."

Lewin said he would like to bring the exhibit to Las Vegas. And it's possible that scenes of Las Vegas life may someday be seen through his lens.

"Las Vegas may be an essay," he said.

The juxtaposition of the themed hotels along the Strip is fascinating, he said.

"It has its own culture. It's so unreal. It's like movie sets but they have more depth than movie sets. Here there is life all the time, and the mixture of characters is just great."