Cashman Photo has deep roots in Las Vegas area

In 1967, Caesars Palace had been open less than a year, Muhammad Ali had just been stripped of his heavyweight boxing title for refusing to fight in Vietnam, Siegfried and Roy performed in Las Vegas for the first time and a little family-run company called Cashman Photo Enterprises opened in Las Vegas.

“I had a twin brother, who has since sadly passed, and he and I were doing photography in Florida, taking pictures of tourists,” Morgan Cashman said. “My brother came out here and met (Caesars Palace founder) Jay Sarno, and Sarno convinced him to set up a business out here. Here we still are, almost 50 years later.”

Morgan and Harris Cashman started shooting pictures of tourists with a camera they borrowed from their stepfather, who owned a camera equipment store in Miami.

The brothers opened their first hotel concession in 1958 at the Eden Roc on Miami Beach. By the time Morgan moved to Las Vegas in 1971, the business was well established, with tourists happily buying souvenir photos to remember their time in the resort corridor.

While the business was simple at first, the company has tried to not just keep up with the times but to be ahead of every innovation of photography developed in the last half-century.

“We were the first to shoot color transparency film in the tourist photo business,” Morgan Cashman said. “Later, we were the first to offer 20-minute color film developing in the hotels. People would wait and time us. They couldn’t believe we could really do it.”

Like the rest of the photography industry, film developing hasn’t been a part of Cashman’s business for quite some time, but rather than bemoan the changing times, the company has embraced each new technology and product it can find or develop.

“About 20 years ago, we started doing 3-D scans of people and etching the image inside a crystal at the hotels,” said Karen Cashman, Morgan’s wife and president of the company’s retail division. “Later, we were approached by Walmart to do something similar at their stores. Of course, we had to find a way to do it less expensively, so we developed a way to do the same process in glass.”

About 20 years ago, Morgan Cashman developed several ways to use greenscreen photography in retail locations catering primarily to tourists. He worked out ways to make it a viable option at booths, kiosks and other locations. He followed that up with greenscreen video, allowing customers to be inserted into a pre-recorded animation.

The company has had operations in nearly every hotel on the Strip and still does in most. In 1983, it moved from offices on Maryland Parkway to its current location, 3660 Morgan Cashmans Way, in the light industrial area not far from Chinatown and the Rio.

The building has a relatively humble exterior, but inside there are many sumptuous decorating details, including a stained-glass door, a marbled wall treatment that was created in one piece down the length of more than 100 feet of hallway and display cases of some of the hundreds of products the company creates. Constant expansion of the output the company offers has led to its expansion into several nearby buildings.

Cashman has let more operations go than many companies would ever dream of running, and yet, it continues to expand.

“At one time, we had operations in Honolulu, Atlantic City, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Monte Carlo (Monaco), and we had a gaming license in New Jersey, and that’s not easy to get,” Morgan Cashman said. “Eventually, we decided that the satellite operations were too difficult to maintain, and we concentrated on Las Vegas.”

Scaling back on the out-of-town locations didn’t mean the company scaled back locally. If photography is involved, the Cashmans are likely to be doing it, and in many cases, pioneering it.

The company still does the meet-and-greet photography that brought it to town but now also handles thrill ride photography, weddings, special events photography, photography for advertising, including food photography, and dozens of other types of pictures.

“We do about 10,000 weddings a year,” Morgan Cashman said.

The company has a separate division called Cashman Brothers that specializes in high-end photography, shooting wedding and engagement photos for the rich and famous and creating elegant prints and frames for display.

Because they have shot so many photos of celebrities over the years, their collection rivals and may surpass that of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s famous Las Vegas News Bureau collection.

“They come to us for pictures,” Morgan Cashman said.

The Cashmans and their company are deeply entrenched in Las Vegas history, culture and high society. Two mayors have declared days in their honor, and recently Morgan Cashman received a belated birthday present when his wife petitioned Clark County commissioners to rename Cinder Lane, the street the company’s main office was on, as Morgan Cashmans Way.

“When someone comes by to show off a new car or something, my husband can just stand in front of the building,” Karen Cashman said. “He can point at the street sign and say, ‘That’s nice. Do you have one of these?’ ”

Contact East Valley View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 702-380-4532.