At the age of eight, Hayley Austin spent the summer in her grandparents’ Las Vegas home. It was located in a subdivision whose streets took their names from Italian villages and Swiss hamlets. As a child, the city baffled and fascinated her. “It seemed like such an improbable place, out there in the desert in the middle of nowhere,” she says. “It lodged itself in my memory, unresolved.”
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In 2018, Austin returned to Las Vegas to look beneath the neon façade of Sin City. The trip resulted in The Springs (Kris Graves Projects), an intimate photography book that explores the city’s jarring wealth gap. “Las Vegas was in the image of get-rich-fast-capitalism,” Austin says. “This unlikely place, a reminder of the optimism or sheer willpower of the people who converted a mirage into a dream city, was the perfect place for a close-up on the American dream’s status.”
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