Vegas dreamtime

It’s to be expected. You take photographs in order to document things — Paris in the case of Eugène Atget in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the shacks of the American south in the case of Walker Evans in the 1930s — and these documents then acquire a quality of elegy. What is extraordinary is the speed with which this happens, the brevity of the ‘then’. As soon as the images emerge in the developing tray — even, conceivably, the moment the shutter is clicked — they are imbued with how they will be seen in the future.

The photographs in Fred Sigman’s book Motel Vegas were commissioned in the mid-1990s in order to record the signage of once-thriving motels on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. Frame and brief were later expanded to include the motels themselves, many of which had fallen on — or were in the process of falling into — hard times. The pictures were exhibited in 1997 but the 22 years — almost a quarter century’s worth of future — between that show and the publication of this book have lent a neo-archaeological dimension to the undertaking. It’s consistent with the larger tendency whereby components of modernism become a source of lament.

The first motel opened in California in 1925 but the heyday of these hotels for motorists coincided with the post-war period of American prosperity. In the 1960s especially the motel became an architectural extension of something that appears almost inconceivable except in retrospect: Las Vegas glamour. Vegas was a wonderland, and the faithful who flocked to it needed accommodation. Motel signs were a way of meeting the humdrum necessity of providing shelter without breaking the spell of the magically boozy kingdom of the Rat Pack.