Wolke, J: 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, charged with expectation and aspiration. Wolke's images expose the symbols of desire alongside 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 thirty years ago.