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.

Barbara Traub is a photographer and multimedia artist currently residing in San Francisco, California. Her works have exhibited internationally and her photography of Burning Man has appeared in Wired, Photo District News, San Francisco Chronicle, and New Age. She was chief photographer for HardWired's book Burning Man and curator of 'Art of Burning Man' at Photo SF. He is the spokesman, executive director of the Burning Man Project. He serves as chairman of Burning Man's senior staff and Black Rock City LLC, its executive committee. He produces Burning Man's annual newsletter and writes articles and essays for the Project's website. He is a prize-winning filmmaker, and in 1990 received the American Film Institute's award for outstanding lifetime achievement. Born in 1935 in Tampa, Florida, he earned a BA in English from Tulane University and an M.F.A. in theatre. In 1967, after two years in the Ph.D. film program at the University of Southern California, he began his first films. A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, he has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. He is founder of City Lights bookstore and publishing, and A Coney Island of the Mind continues to be the most popular poetry book in the U.S.