“I am not a huge gambler,” says Adam Lampton. “The first time I went to Macau, fresh out of grad school, I didn’t have any money to spare – it all went on camera film. People take it all very seriously, so I was too intimidated to sit down and be the white guy who didn’t know what the hell he was doing.”
As a non-gambler in Macau, the American photographer would have been an oddity – most tourists go there to “play”, hoping Lady Luck glances their way. The former Portuguese colony, now a special administrative region of China, is the world’s gambling mecca. Located on China’s south-east coast, just across the water from Hong Kong, Macau’s gambling revenues often put the US’s “Sin City” in the shade.
Lampton has captured this and many other sides of Macau in his new photography book, Nothing Serious Can Happen Here, the title of which is taken from WH Auden’s 1938 poem Macao. Lampton first visited the region in 2006, living and working there for a year on a fellowship grant from the Fulbright Program, which aims to improve intercultural relations. He returned for shorter expeditions in 2015 and 2019.
During that time, he’s seen Macau transformed. “The modern destination is really limited to the relatively new development, called the Cotai Strip, built on landfill between two islands, Taipa and Coloane. When I first got there, everything was in process, with lots of cranes and construction. By my last trip, it was almost completely finished. They created this Vegas in the space of 10 years.”
Gambling in Macau has been legal since 1847 – with Hong Kong under colonial British rule superseding it as a trading port, the Portuguese government legitimised the industry to bring in more money. Macau remained Portuguese until 1999, when it was handed over to China. With gambling illegal and punishable with prison time across China, it’s a little jarring that the Communist party presides over the greatest gambling destination in the world, one that, like Vegas, attracts corruption and vice, with “saunas” across the Cotai Strip and sex workers operating on the gaming floors.
Lampton wanted to tease out Macau’s contradictions: colonial history, Chinese traditions and casino-driven capitalism. “Outside the main gambling area, there are residential neighbourhoods with a quiet, quaint, romantic, colonial feel, where not much is happening,” he says. He also wanted to show not just the scale of China’s mega-projects and constructions, but also give a sense that “there are real lives happening there”.
The Chinese government is working to diversify Macau’s tourist offering. “Their vision for the city is more of a mainstream, family-friendly ‘entertainment zone’, with conference centres and more,” says Lampton. But gambling, which has accounted for up to 80% of Macau’s annual tax income, is not about to disappear. “The Chinese government is very entrepreneurial,” says Lampton. “They want to experiment with different forms of government, almost as laboratories, to see what works and what they don’t like. With Macau, they’re never going to stop gambling because it brings in way too much money.”
Lampton’s book is a testament to the city’s contradictions, featuring images of grand casinos, bustling streets, and quiet residential areas. The photographer’s work captures the city’s transformation over the years, from the construction of the Cotai Strip to the opening of new hotels and casinos.