A class’s varied views of Vegas

By Charlotte Hsu

Sunday, May 11, 2008 | 2 a.m.

To the person who walks head down, eyes on the ground, the city is a mess of sewer caps and gutters, of cracked pavement, of concrete darkened by the footsteps of countless pedestrians.

To the man who looks up at the sky, the city is a place of endless beauty — sunsets and sunrises, gently curving contrails, airplanes glowing like brilliant gems in the night.

Like any city, Las Vegas is, in fact, many cities.

And through pictures that 15 students have taken this semester in The Las Vegas Document, an experimental College of Southern Nevada class, we see the city from a rich variety of perspectives. Through the photographers’ eyes, we quickly discover new places, new people, new ways of viewing the world around us that we thought we knew so well.

The for-credit course, the syllabus proclaims, is not just about shooting, but about exploration, too.

Together with their professor, Heather Protz, the students took six field trips to places including the Strip and Fremont Street to take photographs.

During each outing, classmates snapped pictures capturing a designated theme. On a Valentine’s Day shoot, they photographed lovebirds and wedding chapels. The topic “Wild in the City” inspired images of nature (a snake, a rock gulch) and city life (colorful storefronts, fliers peddling erotic services).

“There were times when five or seven of us would shoot the exact same thing, but they’d all look slightly different,” said Jennifer Maupin, 27, a freelance photographer and part-time waitress in the class.

Shooting with a group “might open your eyes up to something that you didn’t realize before, or something you didn’t see in that place before,” she said.

After each excursion, Protz posted people’s favorite photographs to a class blog at http://thelvdocument.blogspot.com.

Students are also completing a personal project, a series of pictures documenting a subject of their choice in Las Vegas.

Maupin, for example, is photographing business owners and other folks who have contributed to revitalizing downtown. Classmates are shooting portraits of strangers, skyscapes and a mishmash of other things Vegas.

As the semester draws to a close, students are preparing their images for a class book that Protz hopes will be available for purchase online this month. She plans to teach the course each spring, when good weather has students eager to spend time outside instead of cooped up in a classroom.

Tom Myers, chairman of Protz’s media technologies department, says her class is a hit because students relish the freedom she gives them to experiment.

“She doesn’t impose any kind of rigid standard or anything like that,” he said. “I think she allows the students to express themselves, and I think once they taste that, it kind of becomes provocative and interesting, and once they become engaged they tend to put more effort into it.”

As a result, each student’s work conveys a distinct vision of the city.

Jennifer Maupin

Maupin’s portraits of downtown notables have a crisp, clean quality. The Las Vegas in her photographs is the one we know, only more beautiful, more immaculate. The colors are rich, almost creamy, the lights and shadows more pronounced.

Those physical qualities of her art reflect her feelings about parts of the city other people consider downtrodden and gritty.

The class’ first group shoot was on Fremont Street, and Maupin noticed that “everybody focused on the poor and the dirty and the rundown buildings.”

Her vision of that neighborhood was different. Her boyfriend works for the city supporting redevelopment of the area. She lives in Summerlin but often heads downtown to dine, catch a movie or check out antique stores.

“Downtown seems like there’s more of a community ... I don’t want to knock Summerlin at all, because I live here and I like it, but it also comes off as a bit superficial,” said Maupin, a Michigan native who moved here nearly five years ago after spending time in Los Angeles.

So she set out to use her personal project to portray downtown “in a good light.”

So far, she has photographed people including Sam Cherry, the developer behind Vegas projects such as Soho Lofts; Michael Cornthwaite, owner of the Downtown Cocktail Room; and Michael Wardle, a local artist.

Maupin plans to continue adding to her series after the class is over. Part of what drives her to shoot, she said, is her subjects’ enthusiasm for her project. Each person she photographed gave her names of other community contributors she should seek out.

“It was so inspiring to see all the people of downtown coming together and promoting other people and goodwill and the greatness of downtown,” she said. “It was just a really nice experience, and it still is.”

Todd Miller

Miller, 31, an aspiring photographer, wants you to look into the eyes of these people — people you might avoid as you walk past them, casting your glance downward to escape their gaze.

In one snapshot, a man Miller said was handing out “nudie pictures” is yelling, apparently indignant about his photograph being taken. A second image features a straggly-haired man who asked Miller for money.

In a third, a man in a bronze suit jacket and blue, button-up shirt stands on Fremont Street. He’s a preacher, according to Miller, one of those “guys that have the signs that tell you you’re going to hell.”

In each photograph, the subject stares into the camera lens, and therefore, directly at you.

“I like the eye contact that each person is making, that every single one of them is them for who they are,” said Miller, who calls his project “Faces of Las Vegas.”

“By forcing people to look at this image, they have to look at this guy, they have to see him for who he is.”

Miller, a part-time photographer’s assistant, moved to Las Vegas from the Midwest five years ago. After he arrived, he worked odd jobs, as he had since dropping out of high school following his father’s death.

“I went from crappy job to crappy job to crappy job,” he said. “And I’ve always thought the next job will be the new thing that will make me happier, but what I realized is that those jobs were easy. Any monkey could do it.”

Looking for a change, he got his high school equivalency diploma and enrolled at CSN two years ago. He’s working toward an associate’s degree in commercial photography, which he hopes will lead to a career in that field.

For now, he said he wants to use his skills to show people his adopted hometown, to shed light on the “sides of Las Vegas that people never, ever see.”

Linda Alterwitz-Mizrahi

The Las Vegas Document has given Alterwitz-Mizrahi, 47, a new appreciation for the city in which she has lived almost continuously since she was a child.

The bustling resorts that made Las Vegas famous made her claustrophobic, so for years, she avoided them. But forced to spend time on the Strip in class, she made an unexpected discovery.

“The casinos are really beautiful when you look at them,” said Alterwitz-Mizrahi, an artist and part-owner of Walker Furniture, a local family business. “They’re so incredible, and if you look at them with a different eye, there’s really some beauty in all those lights and stuff that I just kind of tried to ignore for 20, 30 years.”

Alterwitz-Mizrahi, who holds a master of fine arts in painting and drawing, took up photography less than two years ago.

Her paintings are abstract, dynamic pieces of art born from a fusion of shapes and colors. Some of the photographs she has taken in Protz’s class share those qualities.

One, snapped with a toy camera, is a black-and-white riot of polka dots, overlapping images of parts of the Planet Hollywood resort. Another piece, in sepia and composed of overlapping frames, captures the skinny profile of the Wynn Las Vegas and contrails streaking across the sky.

Alterwitz-Mizrahi’s Las Vegas is filled with beauty. It’s a place packed with colors, shapes, texture, movement, all the elements of art.

“Vegas isn’t always the glitz and glamour and everything else that’s associated with that. There’s a lot more to Las Vegas. The desert, the beauty of looking at it in a different vision — looking at the Strip or downtown with a different vision.”