Children of Las Vegas
Over forty million people a year travel to Vegas, more than to Mecca. It is a global celebrity, an improbable oasis, a place offering bank-breaking fortunes and instant gratification, 24/7, with no moral debits.
Award-winning writer Timothy O’Grady lived in Vegas for two years. He finally began to understand it when he talked to people who had grown up there, the children of the card dealers and cocktail shakers, the jugglers and the dancers – young people who had been bearing witness to this strange city all their lives. One had her student loans and credit card limits stolen by her father. Another fled a sequence of exploiters until she found herself living in the storm drains under the casinos. There is the boy whose father entered him into a drinking contest when he was eight, the casino owner’s son, the erudite contortionist turned stripper. Each tells their own tale.
In Children of Las Vegas, O’Grady renews his partnership with renowned photographer Steve Pyke. Through short essays, Pyke’s portraits and ten witness testimonies, he pierces the city’s glittering façade to reveal the darker reality that lies beneath.
Timothy O’Grady was born in Chicago and has lived in Ireland, London, Spain and now Poland. He is the author of three novels – Motherland, I Could Read the Sky and Light – and three works of non-fiction: Curious Journey, On Golf and, most recently, Divine Magnetic Lands. Children of Las Vegas is his second collaboration with photographer Steve Pyke.
Steve Pyke is considered one of the leading portrait photographers in the world. His work, including the series Philosophers and Astronauts, has been exhibited worldwide. He has published nine books, and for the past forty years he has worked consistently on a series collecting the 'Faces of Our Time'. In 2004 Steve received an MBE for his services to the arts, and in 2006 he was made a Friend of the Royal Photographic Society. He lives in New Orleans.