Austrian photographer Stefanie Moshammer’s recent project “Vegas and She” led her to the underbelly of Nevada’s shimmering city, Las Vegas. The places she takes her camera to are stark, shiny dreamworlds – they take us away from reality and are somewhere between illusion, desire and fantasy. With its backdrop of a burning desert, this man-made oasis encompasses so many worlds standing at odds with one another, that the resulting feeling is that of an eerie Western mecca. In this ambiguous world, her protagonists are Striptease dancers, the ones who keep Vegas moving, keep it pushing, the inside that keeps alive the outside. Portraying the world behind the shiny facade of Vegas, with it’s constructed settings and beguiling scenery, the series of images for ‘Vegas and She’ appear as a stark contrast to the glitz usually associated with that place. Her pictures are raw and wild, but at the same time poetic and dreamlike – a version of a bitter sweetness, translated into the series of ‘Vegas and She’.

Stefanie Moshammer, born 1988 in Vienna, Austria. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria.