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I was in Las Vegas recently and, purely by chance, stumbled on a Peter Lik gallery. It's in Mandalay Place, which is an underground shopping arcade linking the Luxor to Mandalay Bay. Later on my trip I stumbled across another one, at Caesar's Palace, and then a third one, at The Venetian.
The photography community loves to hate Lik, and I think with good reason. He's s competent photographer but his pictures are, mostly, over-saturated eye candy. His talent for self promotion is vast and is probably matched only by his ego.
But the galleries. Wow.
The presentation of his images was absolutely superb. Firstly they're all printed BIG - the smallest ones were probably 3 feet x 2 feet or thereabouts, there were a lot that were probably about 6 feet by 4 feet, and some were up to about 12 feet by 8 feet. And as well as having really vibrant colours, they have an incredible luminosity to them, as if they're backlit. That isn't actually the case though. It was a quiet morning at Mandalay Place and the gallery assistant showed me (in the demonstration room set aside for that purpose!) that the luminosity is just a product of the materials used. I don't know exactly what the printing process is - I'm not an expert on printing by any means - but they guy said they use paper with a high silver halide content, or something like that, which creates the vibrance. In the demo room they can play with the lighting and it's really astonishing to see how the image responds to variations in lighting. The quality control on the printing and presentation is clearly very high too.
Obviously I'm never going to buy one of his photos, and I guess nobody here is either. I don't have the space and I don't have the money. But before I saw the gallery I would have added a third reason, which is that they're just over-saturated eye candy, and that reason basically melted away when I saw the gallery. If I had a 10,000 square foot ranch house in Colorado, I could quite easily imagine having one of his images on a wall there. (And I guess people with 10,000 square foot ranch houses in Colorado are the sort of audience he's targeting.)
If you find yourself in Las Vegas, it's well worth checking out his galleries.
The photography community loves to hate Lik, and I think with good reason. He's s competent photographer but his pictures are, mostly, over-saturated eye candy. His talent for self promotion is vast and is probably matched only by his ego.
But the galleries. Wow.
The presentation of his images was absolutely superb. Firstly they're all printed BIG - the smallest ones were probably 3 feet x 2 feet or thereabouts, there were a lot that were probably about 6 feet by 4 feet, and some were up to about 12 feet by 8 feet. And as well as having really vibrant colours, they have an incredible luminosity to them, as if they're backlit. That isn't actually the case though. It was a quiet morning at Mandalay Place and the gallery assistant showed me (in the demonstration room set aside for that purpose!) that the luminosity is just a product of the materials used. I don't know exactly what the printing process is - I'm not an expert on printing by any means - but they guy said they use paper with a high silver halide content, or something like that, which creates the vibrance. In the demo room they can play with the lighting and it's really astonishing to see how the image responds to variations in lighting. The quality control on the printing and presentation is clearly very high too.
Obviously I'm never going to buy one of his photos, and I guess nobody here is either. I don't have the space and I don't have the money. But before I saw the gallery I would have added a third reason, which is that they're just over-saturated eye candy, and that reason basically melted away when I saw the gallery. If I had a 10,000 square foot ranch house in Colorado, I could quite easily imagine having one of his images on a wall there. (And I guess people with 10,000 square foot ranch houses in Colorado are the sort of audience he's targeting.)
If you find yourself in Las Vegas, it's well worth checking out his galleries.