Photographer Geoffrey Ellis Channels the Debauched Spirit of 70s and 80s Vegas (NSFW)

Valley of the Meadows is San Francisco-based photographer Geoffrey Ellis’ depiction of the Las Vegas that existed in the 1970s and 80s, a time when he says “the city was in a depressing downward spiral and the criminal entities running the city were slowly losing their grip.” This is the Vegas that was sandwiched between the Hollywood-esque days of high rollers and The Rat Pack in the 1950s and 60s and the transition in the 1990s and 2000s into “a family friendly destination which ultimately became a type of adult Disneyland.”

Ellis references a quote from the character Sam Rothstein in Martin Scorsese’s film Casino that he says adequately sums up the transformation: “The town will never be the same. After the Tangier’s [was torn down] the big corporations took it all over, today it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior’s college money on the poker slots.”

Ellis presents a collection of images that we feel compelled to piece together, lingering like clues to a larger reveal and resonating with a tension and darkness akin to this mythic land of opportunity “where the extremes of luxury and vice are out in the open and the lure of promise draws one in.” We are left to contemplate the place Ellis has constructed, “where an amplified sense of desperation, loneliness, and violence all exist in tandem with power, sexuality and good fortune,” making it “as seductive as it is repellent.”

Discover More