Images wrap viewer in Vegas

Photos by THOMAS SCHIFF / courtesy of game day communications

A panoramic photo of Bally’s on the Strip, top, is among the works in “Vegas 360” by Thomas Schiff, whose work is on being featured at the Las Vegas Art Museum.

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Friday, Nov. 14, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Photos by THOMAS SCHIFF / courtesy of game day communications

The view of Fremont Street downtown, bottom, includes many of Schiff's preoccupations: saturated colors, electric eye candy and tourists.

The idea of shooting 360-degree panoramic photos of Las Vegas seems gimmicky at first. But Cincinnati photographer Thomas R. Schiff, whose work is featured in “360 Las Vegas” at the Las Vegas Art Museum, avoids cheap exploitation of our wonderland. Instead, he takes advantage of the spacious lobbies, saturated colors of the Strip and flat openness of the valley to create new landscapes, perfectly symmetrical compositions and fluid abstractions.

Using marbled floors, pillars, themed buildings, electric eye candy and tourists as his palette, Schiff creates new perspectives on familiar sites by warping lines. He rearranges and recontextualizes the geography: Las Vegas Boulevard curves and warps.

Buildings balloon in proportion to their counterparts, making them stars among a chorus of otherwise larger attractions demanding your attention. Perspective is completely altered in the photographs. Fremont Street no longer appears as linear. It bends and runs parallel with intersecting streets. The Venetian arches and stands prominent. The MGM lion on the corner of Tropicana Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard appears as a centerpiece in a roundabout that places the New York-New York skyline and the Tropicana in the distance. Saturated colors emphasize a Land of Oz sensation.

Schiff, whose work sets the viewer on the ground, in the scene, and stops the frenzy long enough to capture it with a Hulcherama 360 camera mounted on a tripod, giving the viewer the sense of what any scene in Las Vegas might look like if you could look at it all at once.

In some photos, the camera places objects in the foreground, giving you the sense that you are there, but looking in from behind the bushes at the Mirage volcano — or in the case of the Bellagio Conservatory, from behind giant plants. From the garage of the Mirage, you’re looking over and into this jungle of tropical trees and casino rooftops. Porte-cocheres are like giant mushrooms sparkling above you.

High-end interior design and thoughtful color schemes translate well to formal portraits that in a 360-degree angle resemble Ukrainian Easter eggs.

Schiff’s photographs, which are also featured in a book sold at the museum, tugs viewers to ask, “Why is Las Vegas?”

Double down in San Francisco

A fantastic little Las Vegas exhibit is featured at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through Jan. 4.

“Double Down: Two Visions of Las Vegas,” features two short films juxtaposed on opposite walls in a quiet cube of a room with two benches in the middle.

Shown consecutively, Stephen Dean’s “No More Bets” and Olivo Barbieri’s “site-specific_LAS VEGAS 05” heighten the idea that something and nothing are happening at once in Las Vegas. Ungrounded stimuli are the extent of this gash of trinkets in the Mojave Desert.

“Bets,” a mostly sensory experience, exudes the schizophrenic nature of Las Vegas through repetitive close-ups of blinking lights, video screens, background noise — voices, dice shaking and the muffled melody of slot machines.

Barbiero’s aerial view of the city offers voyeurism via a tilt-shirt lens that transforms Las Vegas buildings and surrounding landmarks into little toy models. The shaky camera and thumping of helicopter blades intensifies the feeling of surveillance that begins while over the Red Rock Conservation Area and Hoover Dam, then circles and surveys the palaces on the Strip. The film ends quietly and abruptly mid-ride through the night as if the camera were off to some other distraction. You’re left asking the “why?” of Las Vegas.