Photographer’s new book captures 360 degrees of Las Vegas

By Becky Bosshart

Friday, Nov. 7, 2008 | midnight

We've all seen the same old subjects photographed many times before — the Vegas skyline on a postcard, the welcome sign in the family scrapbook or Fremont's neon canopy on the evening news. What more can be added to the din?

Photographer Thomas Schiff captures all that makes Vegas gauche in a single, circular shot. What makes his new Las Vegas Art Museum exhibit different is the camera. He focused his Hulcherama 360-degree panoramic and mounted it on a customized tripod that can telescope up to 20 feet.

"Everything here is over the top," Schiff said at a Las Vegas Art Museum reception. The BrightCity book "Vegas 360" was released with the Oct. 25 opening of the museum exhibition "Thomas R. Schiff: Vegas 360."

"It's overdone. It's over lighted. It's over colored. Everything screams out to be photographed with a panoramic."

For aesthetics, some of the photos have been cropped to 220 degrees, according to the museum.

Schiff captured what art critic Dave Hickey called a design logic available only to "dizzy drunks and dervishes." Hickey, a UNLV English professor and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, wrote the introductory essay to Schiff's newest volume, his fourth collection of panoramic photographs.

Five essays by local writers complement the 64 photographs. The welcome — and oft-photographed — Las Vegas sign was the inspiration for Phil Hagen of Henderson,

"It has maintained its integrity and it works in the context of old Vegas and up until now with the theme resorts and ultra lounges," he said.

Implosions behind it, along with the foreclosures and layoffs, the sign still stands, as it has since 1959. It's the one piece of local public art that has made it on key chains and in people's homes around the world, Hagen said.

Schiffhas worked with panoramic cameras since 1994. During exposures, the camera's base remains fixed while a timer coordinates the camera's rotation with the advance of the 220 color negative film.

Schiff's Vegas project spanned 1999-2006. Twenty images from the book are in the exhibit. All sales of "Vegas 360" benefit the museum. The $40 book is only available at the museum office and Bleu Gourmet, 8751 W. Charleston, suite 110.

Becky Bosshart can be reached at 990-7748 or [email protected].