Albert Watson’s Strip Search (2010) is a sustained photographic portrait of Las Vegas, made over five years and published as a two-volume hardcover set. Rather than treating the city as a backdrop for spectacle alone, Watson brings together landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and reportage-style photographs to examine its built environments, objects, and inhabitants. The result is a city portrait shaped by the photographer’s established command of graphic, sculptural form, but attentive to the many registers through which Las Vegas presents itself.

The book’s two-part structure is central to its character. The portrait-oriented first volume includes a special 48-page tabloid section, while the second volume shifts to a landscape format. This change in scale and direction allows the material to move between concentrated studies and broader spatial views, giving the sequence a deliberately varied physical and visual rhythm. Across more than 270 illustrations, Watson places the polished, theatrical, and often enigmatic surfaces of the city alongside quieter observations and human presence.

For collectors, Strip Search deserves attention as a substantial monographic account of a place closely associated with the culture of images, yet recorded here through more than its familiar signs. It also marks an important intersection in Watson’s practice: the precision of fashion and portrait photography meets the openness of landscape and documentary observation. Issued in English in 2010 by PQ Blackwell under ISBN 9780473173890, the hardcover set extends to 277 catalogued pages and measures approximately 37.5 × 29.2 × 6.3 cm. Its scope, two-volume design, and sustained engagement with Las Vegas make it a particularly focused statement within Watson’s photographic work.