Neon-Vintage Las Vegas

Promoting my film "Assault of the Killer Bimbos" to theater owners at the AMF in Las Vegas in 1988, I ran around Sin City taking photos of the famous neon signs. Little did I knew then, those same neon masterpieces would end up in the Neon Boneyard decades later when those buildings were demolished. I returned a few more times to Las Vegas and continued to document vintage signs. In 2003, I photographed the city for a calendar and travel cards.

The competitive spirit of the Vegas Strip was directly tied to the signage–the bigger and flashier the better. The eye-catching signage helped create a visual identity of the dusty desert town. The iconic Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign, designed in 1959 by Betty Willis, remains a landmark greeter. Between the 1930s and 1950s, the glow of neon boomed in cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New York City. Between the 1940s and 1960s, Las Vegas became known as the "Neon Capital of the World." From the 1990s to the present, neon has been recognized as a form of historic and artistic expression.

On my last trip in 2016, I was so impressed with the Neon Boneyard of the Neon Museum Las Vegas and their preservation of these historic signs, that I donated images from my collection of vintage Las Vegas signs to their archives. In this gallery of images, you see signs as they appeared on the Las Vegas strip and where they ended up as the museum attempts to keep the story of these once great art works of history alive.