Vegas Neon

Motel Vegas by Fred Sigman. Smallworks Press, 2019, $29.99 cloth.

IT’S TO be expected. You take photographs in order to document things—Paris in the case of Eugène Atget in the late nineteenth and early twentieth 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 were commissioned in the mid-1990s in order to record the signage of once-thriving motels on Fremont Street