Desert to Dream: A Dozen Years of Burning Man Photography

This groundbreaking, eyewitness account of this iconic festival bursts with striking color photography. A collectible coffee table book for pop culture and Burning Man fans.

The Black Rock Arts Festival (otherwise known as "Burning Man") has become an annual pilgrimage for a generation of artists to the dry alkali flats of northwest Nevada's Black Rock Desert during the last days of summer. From dawn to dusk, Traub brings Black Rock City to you: whirlwinds and sandstorms, art cars to mobile sculptures, outlandish outfits to painted bodies, neon and flames lighting the night, and interactive installations meant to be incinerated in a final fire of glory.

This trailblazing photo collection features an introduction by award-winning filmmaker Les Blank, foreword and afterword by Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, epilogue by beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and a contribution by Star Trek's Mr. Spock, Leonard Nimoy. More than 150 sensational color and black and white photographs bring to life an incredible event that now attracts 80,000 people every year. This revised edition includes sixteen more pages and two-dozen new photographs from 2006 and 2009, and appeals to participants and artists worldwide.

This book is an unprecedented photographic record of a decade of Burning Man celebrations -- from its infancy as a performance art exhibition in the late 80's to its explosion as a pop culture, community-driven phenomenon today. Photographer Barbara Traub captures the sacred and profane through photos of otherworldly artifacts, structures, and costumes that defy description, and comments upon these dynamic visions with captions that go behind the scenes.

This book is a landmark, remarked Larry Harvey, the founder and director of Burning Man. It does more than illustrate a so-called counter-cultural event. Rather, it exhibits the integrity and singleness of vision of a complete work of art. I think that a sophisticated public is ready for this. It is among the first to get things right. It does not merely display Burning Man in pictures or explain it in words: it manifests the spirit of our culture through its style.

Barbara Traub first photographed the effigy of a man set ablaze every year at Burning Man in 1994. Her first shots became the iconic image on her book cover. - Time

Publisher: Immedium
Published: 08/23/2011
Pages: 176
Weight: 3lbs
Size: 10.00h x 10.90w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781597020268


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/18/2011

About the Author
Barbara Traub is a photographer and multimedia artist, whose work has exhibited at the San Francisco Arts Commission, Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, CBGB's Gallery 313 and Cooper Union in New York, Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles, UMBC and School 33 in Baltimore, Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, Les Rencontres d'Arles in France, and the International Fotofestival of Knokke-Heist in Belgium.

Her photography of Burning Man has appeared in Time, Wired, Digital Journalist, Spiegel Online, Photo District News, De Standaard, San Francisco Chronicle, Pozytyw, and New Age. She (and her photos) performed in the Stagewerx premiere of the Burning Man rock opera How To Survive The Apocalypse. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, she resides in San Francisco, California.