Features

The Year in Las Vegas Photos (and the stories behind them)

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Pandemics and protests, victories and upsets, grand openings and unexpected closings … This past year in Las Vegas was so unpredictable and weird, words sometimes couldn’t fully describe it. Fortunately, the Weekly also has pictures, and some of the most talented photographers in this Valley are out shooting them for us, day after day, week after week.Weekly’s art and editorial departments have selected their favorite images shot by our photographers throughout 2021.The We present those images here, with a few words from the people who shot them: Yasmina Chavez, Christopher DeVargas, Steve Marcus and Wade Vandervort. It might not have been the best year in human history, but it has a great-looking yearbook.

Yasmina Chavez

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LUXURY FURNITURE STORE Local shoegaze band Luxury Furniture Store don lampshades and light up on March 26. This is a single image, not a composite; Chavez set up multiple flashes with color gels to get this striking multiple exposure. “I’ve done this a lot in my own artwork, long exposures and playing with light and movement, so I knew what I was getting myself into.” And the band members, visual artists themselves, gladly cooperated, one of them from past experience: “One of the band members [Holly Haywood] was in my intermediate class at UNLV. I was, like, ‘Oh, Holly! I haven’t seen you in forever.’”

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POLAR PLUNGE Participants in the 2021 Las Vegas Polar Plunge show off their bee costumes in front of a vintage swimsuit billboard at Cowabunga Bay on March 27. The event was a fundraiser for Special Olympics Nevada. “It’s just so funny, the juxtaposition,” Chavez says. “The best shots are always the candid ones, where things just fall into place and they’re not actually aware that you caught something.”

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CRAZY GIRLS A passerby watches the departure of the “No Ifs, Ands, or Butts” statue from Planet Hollywood on June 15. The Michael Conine statue, used to promote the show since its original run at the Riviera, will be stored until the Crazy Girls show, which closed as a result of the pandemic shutdown, finds a new venue. “[This] is so Vegas to me,” Chavez says. “If you’re gonna describe Vegas, that’s where I would be, like, ‘Imagine a statue of butts being hauled down a really populated city sidewalk.”

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FEET OF SNOW Footprints—human, avian and canine—weave through fallen snow at Centennial Hills Park on January 26. “One of my favorite things in photography is [shooting] the remnants of an event, or the evidence of something having happened,” Chavez says.

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BACK TO SCHOOL Student ambassadors line up for the first day of school in Henderson on August 9. This was a twofold special occasion: the opening of the new Hannah Marie Brown Elementary School and a return to in-person schooling. “These were second-graders, but for a lot of them, it was their first time at school,” Chavez says. “They were just so adorable.”

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FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN The Sandy Valley wildfire rages on June 10. Chavez took this photo from the intersection of State Route 160 and Sandy Valley Road. The dramatic purple lighting is from a parked police vehicle that had its red and blue lights on. “It’s a long exposure, so the light sort of blends,” Chavez says.

Steve Marcus

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HALO-HALO Filipino restaurant Full House BBQ serves up a Flaming Halo-Halo dessert on January 9. “I don’t know if I want to give away all the trade secrets or anything, but all my food shots are kind of the same: I give it a main light, a fill light and then a strong back light,” Marcus says. But this time, he couldn’t do that; too much light would create excessive contrast with the flame. “So, in this case, it’s minimally lit, with a slow shutter so that you can see the flame flickering.”

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THE LOOP A Tesla electric car cruises through the tunnels of the Elon Musk-conceived Las Vegas Convention Center Loop on April 9. The Loop, the first commercial project by Musk’s Boring Company, might soon be extended throughout the Strip resort corridor. The tunnels are lit with color-changing LEDs, which Marcus appreciated. “From the photographer’s point of view, it’s just very pretty,” he says. “Kudos to [LVCC and Musk] for putting a little bit of extra money into the lighting.”

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SUDDENLY STREAKING UNLV running back Charles Williams holds up the Island Showdown Trophy after a 27-13 win over the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors at Allegiant Stadium on November 13—the team’s second victory in a row after snapping a 14-game losing skid. “They get pretty excited over any wins these days at UNLV football,” Marcus says, a bit ruefully. “And Williams was the star player of the game.”

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PACQUIAO VS.UGÁS Manny Pacquiao fights Yordenis Ugás at T-Mobile Arena on August 21. Ugás, a replacement for the injured Errol Spence Jr., won the fight by unanimous decision, surprising many—including Marcus. “Everybody was thinking that Ugás wouldn’t be a great challenge for Pacquiao, but the truth is that Pacquiao is 42 years old now, and his legs don’t move as quickly as they used to,” Marcus says. Retired from boxing, the legendary fighter is now running his various businesses and, oh yeah, also running for the presidency of the Philippines.

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LIGHTNING Lightning creases the sky over the Strip on July 25. Marcus says there’s a piece of photographic equipment that automatically detects when a lightning strike is about to occur, but he doesn’t use it. “If I’m shooting at 100 ASA and the exposure on a casino is, like, one minute and [an aperture of] 5.6, I just keep taking one-minute pictures of the casino until some lightning falls into it,” he says. “You can kind of tell where the lightning is, though sometimes you get screwed because you’ll be facing this way and then the lightning will be over there—not in your picture.”

Wade Vandervort

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LAUGHLIN CADDISFLIES Caddisflies fly around the Colorado River in Laughlin on May 26. City officials are taking steps to reduce this overwhelmingly large insect population, which is impacting their tourism. “They just cover all the casinos down there. The windows are covered with caddisflies,” Vandervort says. “There are dead ones, living ones everywhere. I took this with a flash to freeze them as best I could. And by the end, [writer Hillary Davis] and I were covered in caddisflies, too.”

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NOT FADE AWAY The Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood (left) and Mick Jagger perform at Allegiant Stadium on November 6. “We got to shoot the first two songs, and I’ve never shot so many photos in such a short amount of time … because it’s Mick Jagger, you know?” Vandervort says. “And you can tell from this picture that he’s still an animal. He knows how to rock.”

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NICO ALI WALSH Muhammad Ali’s grandson trains at Top Rank Gym on July 12. Walsh, 21, only began his boxing career in August and had a 3-0 record at press time. “I got in the ring with him, and he basically punched towards my lens, because I wanted to get a shot like this,” Vandervort says.

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PRIDE! A member of the North Texas Pride Foundation spreads his wings at the annual Las Vegas Pride Parade in Downtown Las Vegas on October 8. “That was some of the happiest, most fun people I’ve ever seen,” Vandervort says.

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BRETT BOLTON Multimedia artist Brett Bolton poses during a Weekly cover shoot on June 24. Bolton created the projection-mapped images on his face. “He’s like a scientist,” Vandervort says. “This was a very trippy photo shoot. Every time he’d move his hands, all these lights would follow his movements.”

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SPRAY IT DON’T SAY IT The Gazillionaire, from Spiegelworld’s long-running Caesars Palace show Absinthe, cools down in the resort’s iconic fountains on March 30. Vandervort, working with an assist from Yasmina Chavez, put on swim trunks and water shoes and stepped into the fountains with him. ““He stayed in the water with us the whole time,” Vandervort says, “even though it was really cold.”

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CASH THE DALMATION Cash, a Dalmatian belonging to a Weekly staffer, is coaxed into posing for our September 23 “Pets” issue. “That was probably the hardest photo shoot I’ve ever done,” Vandervort says. “He didn’t listen at all. This is us trying to get him to come onto the backdrop so we can get some pictures.”

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KIND CARE Samantha Russell breathes pure oxygen in a pressurized hyperbaric chamber at MountainView Wound Care & Hyperbaric Center on April 21. Russell received a cancer diagnosis at the start of the pandemic in 2020 and was anxious about being able to continue treatments, but has pushed through with grace and relative calm, Vandervort says. “It’s kind of a scary picture, but she was the sweetest person ever. She just sat there watching TV.”

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LA NETA COCINA The Lobsta B.F.T.—short for “big f’n taco”—tempts at La Neta Cocina on November 17. “When you’re shooting food, you can experiment a lot more; you can use harder lighting,” Vandervort says. “Food doesn’t get impatient with you.”

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ERICA VITAL-LAZARE Local writer and scholar Erica Vital-Lazare poses at UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art during Seeing/Seen, a group show that she curated, on August 27. “I saw her nails and I thought they were so colorful and cool, and we had this nice backdrop,” Vandervort says. “I wanted to do the complementary color thing here and get those colors poppin’.”

Christopher DeVargas

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IRON MIKE Mulberry Street Pizzeria owner and founder Richie Palmer chats with boxing great Mike Tyson following the unveiling of a Tyson statue outside the Resorts World restaurant on October 21. “The two of them just kind of leaned in and had a quiet little conversation in front of the statue,” DeVargas says. “It was a pretty nice, candid moment.”

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WINK WORLD Chris Wink, co-founder of Blue Man Group and Area15’s “director of content and cool sh*t,” leads a January 7 tour through Wink World, his immersive, glow-in-the-dark art experience at the popular dining, retail and experience complex. This was a completely candid shot. “That’s the hallway you walk through to start the attraction. These were just natural moments of him leading us through,” DeVargas says. “It was really cool to see his excitement and enthusiasm.”

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SUMMER HEAT In the midst of one of last summer’s excessive heat warnings, a man cools off in the water misters in front of Paris Las Vegas on June 14. “Occasionally, people would walk by and wave their hands in the mist; they’d stop there for a split second,” DeVargas says. “This gentleman stood there for almost a minute, soaking his head, soaking his hat. I thought it was a pretty dramatic image.”

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SAFE & SPECTACULAR A dancer from Extravaganza: The Vegas Spectacular performs for a limited audience at the Jubilee Theater inside Bally’s on March 12. The cast and crew of the show maintained strict COVID-19 safety practices. “They were spraying down the seats and doing all kinds of proper procedures to make sure that it was clean and safe for the audience,” DeVargas says. “It was very interesting to see performers onstage with masks on.”

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A NEW WORLD AWAITS A lone security guard stands between a massive opening-night crowd and Resorts World on June 24. “To the left and right of him are the main doors, which are blocked off with, like, a piece of paper,” DeVargas says. “Once they let them in, the crowd just busted through that.”

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