CASINOLAND – Tired of Winning is the result of a thirty-year-long photography project in which Michael Rababy documents American gambling culture.
Rows of shrill slot machines, glowing billboards, and gaudy splendor appear alongside exhausted faces, weary expressions, and lost games.
Rababy’s realistic camera view scrutinizes the glamorous appearance of gleaming gambling halls and exposes their mendacious promises of wealth. The series focuses more on the casino as a capitalist institution as a whole than on individual gamblers.
This project references a quote from a former U.S. president in which he promised that Americans would be “tired of winning” if they voted for him. He famously bankrupted multiple casinos. The subjects pulling the slot machine levers mirror the hopes of voters who believe such actions will improve their lives.
From the artist statement by Michael Rababy:
“I enjoy going to Vegas as an adult, but not for the gambling (I don’t gamble); I go for the people-watching. Everywhere, I see saturated colors and flashing lights, luring signs assuring nonstop fun, percussive sounds of chaos demanding attention, the poetry of losing, the art of walking away, and the great irony that many do not seem to be feeling the joy they were promised.”
From the text Infinite Light and Gathering Shadows: Michael Rababy’s ‘Casinoland – Tired of Winning’ by Simon Glickman:
Michael Rababy’s Casinoland – Tired of Winning affords a powerful glimpse into a world that is at once brightly lit and shrouded in darkness. Mostly captured surreptitiously during Rababy’s pilgrimages through the starkly lit gambling temples of Las Vegas, Reno, and elsewhere, Casinoland echoes the dystopian spectacle of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, only the dead-eyed workers at the giant subterranean machines are now glazed-over gamers, pitching countless coins down the insatiable throats of one-armed bandits. (…) But Rababy’s images are not misery porn. On the contrary, he finds beauty in the most abject moments, capturing hyperreal color palettes and gathering shadows with equal verve, and drawing epiphanies from nearly every thoughtful composition, all the more remarkable given that many of these pictures were taken covertly and on the fly with a mobile device. Most importantly, with Casinoland – Tired of Winning, Michael Rababy looks the lie squarely in the face and tells the truth.
“CASINOLAND – Tired of Winning is landmark documentary photography on a subject of great significance to understanding America in our time.” Sam Abell – National Geographic
CASINOLAND – Tired of Winning by Michael Rababy is a powerful example of a personal project whose seeds were planted long before the photographer seriously took up photography. Family trips to Las Vegas during his youth led him to see the glitz and glamour through a different lens. Over several years, he has photographed gambling towns with the intent of stripping away illusion and myth to reveal an often harsh and lonely reality. The book is an extraordinary chronicle of commercial gambling, while also reflecting America’s cultural tendency to embrace fantasy over reality.
“CASINOLAND is an absurdist look at everything that is tawdry and meaningless about the current moment, using Las Vegas casinos and the people who spend their days in the funhouse as its subject. Oh Michael, what a fine job of seeing the last days of the Roman Empire in the deserts of Nevada.
There is much about life that is not like this, and we have museums and galleries, and sometimes even our own eyes filled with beauty, to prove it. But in this moment, when so much hidden from many of us has been revealed, it has been there all along if you were looking for it. And Michael Rababy was there, getting ready to show it to you.” Andy Romanoff – The Eye of Photography / L’Œil de la Photographie
About Michael Rababy
Lebanese-American documentary and street photographer and filmmaker Michael Rababy focuses on photographing people. He studied art history at the University of San Diego before spending time in Paris, where he was influenced by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
His ethnographic documentary book American Bachelor details the highs and lows of the single male, followed by Folsom Street Food Court, an irreverent take on the annual street fair in San Francisco. His clients and credits include Billboard Creative, E!, Google, Hamburger Eyes, LA Weekly, Mercedes-Benz, the Oxygen Network, People Magazine, the Sundance Institute, Time Out New York, VICE magazine, The Village Voice, and the Yes Men. He was also the official portrait photographer for TLC’s highly rated series LA Ink. Michael is the photography curator of the Hive Gallery in the downtown Los Angeles arts district and curated the book California Love: A Visual Mixtape (2020). His latest book, Casinoland: Tired of Winning, documents 30 years of casino culture and was published by Kehrer Verlag in Fall 2024.
His short film Still Lives, which tells a story through black-and-white still photographs set to piano music, premiered at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival and was an official selection of the Miami Short Film Festival. His film January Man screened as an official selection at the Boston International Film Festival and the Miami Short Film Festival. Overall, his work can be described as emotionally charged poetic realism.
Michael lives in California with his photobook collection and is currently working on his latest project. [Official Website]
