Desert to Dream: A Decade of Burning Man Photography

“Barbara Traub captures an expansive desert of everything but normality where monstrous beings of all shapes, colors and sizes congregate each year with contraptions that challenge everyday familiarity.”—Sidelines Online

“The event is more than the sum of its art cars, kinetic sculptures or suntanned bodies clad in body paint and glitter (and sometimes not much else).”—Wired

Attended by 20 people on a San Francisco beach in 1986, the “Burning Man” festival has mushroomed into a desert pilgrimage for 40,000 people annually. For one week, Burning Man qualifies as Nevada's fifth-largest city, and climaxes on Labor Day weekend with the burning of four-story tall wooden “man.”

This is an unprecedented photographic record of an evolving decade of Burning Man, from its infancy as a performance art exhibit to its explosion as a pop culture destination. Photographer Barbara Traub captures the sacred and profane, from inspired costumes to otherworldly artifacts that defy convention.

Traub describes the dynamic scenes along with contributions from filmmaker Les Blank, Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Now a global network fueled by the Internet, Burning Man is the twenty-first century’s ultimate celebration of the human imagination.

Barbara Traub is a critically acclaimed photographer residing in San Francisco, California. Her art has exhibited internationally, and her Burning Man photographs have appeared in Wired, Spiegel Online, Photo District News, San Francisco Chronicle, and New Age. Chief photographer for HardWired's book Burning Man, she curated Photo SF’s 2004 “Art of Burning Man” gallery.