B&W Risk – A Gaming Photo Exhibition and Reception

Friday, January 15, 2016 from 5—7:00 pm – Reception

Black & White Risk: A Photography Exhibition by Jan Aphelin

The exhibition will be on display starting January 15th through April 30th, 2016.

The Society invites you to a free reception event at the Society. There will be refreshments and free admission to the galleries.  

The Society's latest exhibition is called Black-and-White Risk by  Jan Aphelin. The show provides an inside view of casinos and the “gaming industry” in Reno, Nevada, around 1980.

The photographs are exceedingly unusual, if not unique, in that Nevada's casinos ban photographs inside their establishments.

In her photographs, Jan Aphelin uniformly finds the right subject at just the right point in time. Beyond this, her collection of images or “photographic suite”, as she puts it, “lets the viewer enter the world of the casino”, showcasing “the people who work in the clubs, walk the streets, and play the games.” 

As Aphelin states, the exhibition explores the “cultural symbolism” of gaming, in which the casino becomes a substitute for the dullness of daily routine and provides the gambler with “an alternate reality”.

Many of the images are also intimate portraits of her friends and associates, as well as of the many other people she saw on a daily basis during “a lifetime of participation in the gambling culture.”