Jay Wolke

When Jay Wolke made these photographs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were two major centers for gambling in the United States: Las Vegas, Nevada and Atlantic City, New Jersey. He was fascinated with the accentuated layers and intersections of people, artifice, architecture and landscape. Wolke was searching for circumstances charged with expectation and aspiration; stirred by fantasy, so that, through the photographs, he might then strip away those expectations, exposing the symbols of desire a longside the realities of uncertainty and deception. The project has now become both a time capsule and an index of the contemporary, addressing larger themes that are every bit as meaningful today as they were 30 years ago.
Jay Wolke is currently a Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the St. Louis Art Museum, Harvard University and the California Museum of Photography. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.