The new edition of Neon Nevada is a love letter to neon, which you might expect — authors Sheila Swan and Peter Laufer bought their first neon sign, a heart, as a Valentine’s Day present some 50 years ago. But their photo book is also a love letter to Nevada, which you might not expect. As Swan and Laufer traverse the Silver State in search of neon signs, they take us from Reno to Elko (the first known neon sign, at the People’s Market, was photographed here in 1918), Pahrump to Laughlin, Wendover to Hawthorne, Beatty to Jackpot. The result is a kaleidoscopic celebration of the mark neon has left on us.
Swan and Laufer, we learn, first set out across Nevada in the 1970s, “saving” neon signs by documenting them with a Pentax Spotmatic camera loaded with Ektachrome 400. They returned in the early ’90s; the first edition of their book was published in 1994. A subsequent trip in 2010 led to a second edition in 2011. This new edition — “one more look and one more book” — is based on their travels in 2022.
The book details the couple’s “nocturnal treasure hunt” for signs, and they describe a motherlode: cowboys and cowgirls, wagon wheels and crosses, bison and palm trees, martini glasses, cards and dice, flamingos and slot machines, even ladies of the night.
Their recollections of their early trips play out like urgent search and rescue operations. Neon has always been at the mercy of predators: pigeons, wind, rocks, snow, water, vandals — to say nothing of the high cost of repair and maintenance. But neon’s biggest enemy over the years has been simple neglect, a belief that the signs — once they had passed out of vogue — were essentially worthless, mere advertising, not art, built to celebrate a young, restless nation on the go; built to be abandoned.
But times have changed, and this latest trip feels like a valedictory lap. Many signs have been lost, but many more, it seems, have been saved. Nevadans have come to cherish their neon, to restore it, to build museums around it. Neon endures because it reminds us of who we are and the scale of our dreams.
The real star of Neon Nevada is the photographs. We often think of neon in its Vegas Strip regalia of lights and colors, infinite possibilities. The gorgeous photos, by contrast, isolate the neon signs, generally pitching them in front of inky black backgrounds, so that “each photograph captured the pure essence of a sign” — often taken from the roof of their VW camper, with one of the pair holding onto the ankles of the other.
Above all, the book reminds us that neon lives. It dazzles and soothes us. It is the ecstatic center of the action and the marker of last resorts — wayward motels on the edge of nowhere, places you go when you’ve already blown your last shot and just don’t know it. But these solitary lanterns, lighting up a street or corner in a town in the middle of the emptiness, embody some kind of hope.
The pair capture this in their description of a giant cowboy sign in Wendover: “Wendover Will emerged high on the horizon, a dapper old-time cowboy with his kerchief and six-gun, waving his enormous mechanical arm and pointing to the last gambling house before the Utah border. He’s the stuff of a neon cowgirl’s dream.”
In Swan and Laufer’s hands, neon moves beyond nostalgia or hipster trendiness. It is a timeless present — gases trapped in vacuumed-sealed glass tubes and charged with 15,000 volts of electricity. Alive.