I have yet to make a pilgrimage to The Sphere, but I think about it more than I’d like to admit, searching for tickets to see Dead & Company under its dome of high-resolution screens or doling out Instagram likes to friends who road-tripped east on Interstate 15 in search of immersive communion. As Las Vegas’s newest attraction, The Sphere opened in 2023, but the values it embodies were there all along. These are captured in the latest photo book from Iwan Baan, Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses: desire, spectacle, the “horror” of global tourism, as contributing essayist Ryan Scavnicky puts it after Nikola Tesla. For all the earthly talk of showgirls and slot machines, fear and loathing, ducks and decorated sheds, Sin City is a place of passion and transcendence: a truth closer to godliness than devilish temptation.
To see the American landscape through the lens of Victoria Sambunaris’ 5×7-inch field camera is to see beauty and majesty—the stuff of patriotic hymns—held in contrapposto with the destructive acts that fuel the nation’s so-called progress: extraction, expansion, exclusion. Mining pits. Railroad tracks. Border fences. Her photographs ask a viewer to meditate on the impact of development on vast parts of the country that largely go unseen. And, in making them visible she shows us what is at stake and what has already been lost.
Sambunaris has an intimate relationship with these panoramas. Every year since 1999, the year she graduated from Yale with an MFA, she’s embarked on a months-long journey to document transformation across the country. Currently, she’s driving through California and Nevada, seeking out sites critical to water resources in the West—places, that in these drought-prone states are long victim to what she describes as “hucksterism and speculation.”