Artist’s exhibit hits pause button on Vegas life

PHOTO courtesy of KEN LAMUG

Photographer Ken Lamug says through his art, our stories are preserved. “Things are happening so fast in this town. I’m documenting the way we are … and how we live.”

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Friday, Nov. 13, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Photographs by Ken Lamug

Launch slideshow »

Street photographer Ken Lamug is bent on capturing life’s moments and places, knowing full well that in Las Vegas everything is ephemeral.

A fitting example of the ever-changing Las Vegas is a photograph in “Beyond the Neon: Street Exposures” in the Image Gallery of the College of Southern Nevada’s Telecommunications Building.

The photograph taken by Lamug shows a woman sweeping the steps of her one-story cottage home in a deteriorating neighborhood in downtown Las Vegas. She’s bent over, focused on her task, wearing a short floral skirt and sleeveless top. Next to her door, propped against her crumbling home, is a painted sign that reads: “I was born this way.”

The viewer might imagine that the sign is her proclamation to the world, but we’ll never know. The presumptions, questions and mystery are part of Lamug’s work.

He snaps moments on film, then moves on, waiting until he’s in his darkroom (yes, darkroom) to discover the bounty he may or may not have, knowing that its subject might soon be gone, making the image all the more valuable.

“Things are changing,” says the 30-year-old photographer from the Philippines who moved to Las Vegas in 1996. “Things are happening so fast in this town. I’m documenting the way we are right now and how we live. The photos will have a different impact and different meaning five years from now. What’s in them might not be there then.”

The sweeping woman is a case in point. Recently Lamug walked through the neighborhood where he shot that photo, saw that the house was abandoned and that neighboring apartments had been cleared out and fenced in, possibly for demolition.

Lamug sees photography as an invaluable tool for preserving our stories.

Equally invaluable is the exhibit that displays it. Images splattered all over the Internet hardly compare to a destination where viewers are removed from life to look at life in a quiet, contemplative space without the distractions that keep us from seeing the world around us.

Viewing photos this way stops time. It provides a breather.

One nitpick is that the images are small and behind glass in a dimly lit room, creating too much of a separation between viewer and photograph. But these moments deserve to be seen.

Lamug’s vignettes of a community through gritty downtown life, family outings, a county fair or random street moments provide an opportunity to consider life’s mundane moments. Elongated shadows, dark tones and silhouettes replace the whitewashed, sun-drenched valley of low-slung buildings. A construction worker on a hot day rests on a curb, his bag of melting ice streams in from of him. A family loads up on cotton candy and caramel apples, an otherwise fleeting moment preserved for strangers. A man lies on the grass median of a parking lot in Lorenzi Park.

A slender man dressed as Santa Claus, most likely for the annual Santa Run race, stands on a downtown corner observing something in the distance. Another man stands outside his house feeding pigeons that flock in his dirt yard. In one image two costumed women passing out bead necklaces on Fremont Street stare at the camera with a menacing glare.

Even more telling about the community is what Lamug leaves out: the suburbs. A car-friendly city with enclosed, and often gated, neighborhoods leaves Lamug seeking areas where people are outside, milling about.

“This is an indoor city,” he says. “People aren’t always outside in the suburbs. You go to a parade in Henderson and after the parade, everybody leaves and the street is deserted.”

In Lamug’s works, everybody stays.