Desert to Dream - (Hardcover)

About the Book

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.

This trailblazing photo collection now features twelve years of Burning Man. In the beginning, it was a display of alternative art. Today it influences contemporary culture around the globe. Celebrated photographer Barbara Traub captures the zeitgeist in a cornucopia of amazing structures, ingenious artifacts, and eye-popping costumes.

Contributions from filmmaker Les Blank; Burning Man founder Larry Harvey; Star Trek's Spock, Leonard Nimoy; and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti help illuminate Traub's unique perspective on this singular festival that now attracts 80,000 people annually. The first edition sold out. This revised edition includes sixteen more pages and two-dozen new photographs from 2006 and 2009, and appeals to participants and artists worldwide.

Book Synopsis

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

From the Back Cover

The Black Rock Arts Festival (a.k.a. "Burning Man") is an annual pilgrimage for generations of artists to the alkali flats of northwest Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Culminating over America's Labor Day weekend, this weeklong event attracts more than 50,000 people. During summer's final days, they celebrate imagination and transformation on this expansive canvas, contained by a ring of mountains and a very big sky. On Saturday night, Black Rock City emerges as Nevada's fifth largest metropolis as attendees burn a four-story tall wooden sculpture of a "man", striped in neon and embedded with fireworks.

This is a groundbreaking visual collection of twelve years of Burning Man, from its inception as a display of alternative art to the recognition of its global influence on contemporary culture. Photographer Barbara Traub captures the zeitgeist in a cornucopia of artifacts, structures, and costumes that defy description. Contributions from filmmaker Les Blank, Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, Star Trek's Spock, Leonard Nimoy, and beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti help to illuminate Traub's unique perspective on this dynamically evolving event.

This revised edition includes 16 more pages and two-dozen new photographs.

Review Quotes

"In these photographs spanning 12 years, photographer Traub becomes 'a part of the spectacle performing the part of the photographer' and captures the spirit of Burning Man, from its starkness to its excess. Rock Spinners features two nudes perched atop a rock, one looking toward the sky, a woman's arms in the air, a man's face hidden from view. The Temple of Joy showcases an intricate structure built of recycled wood that is burned at the festival's end. Traub's approach to her images is appropriately eclectic, yielding photographs as colorful as the festival itself and accentuating Burning Man's surreality, whimsy, and play with the occasional fish-eye lens. The night shots that make up the latter third of the book abandon all restraint and explode in color and light."

"Barbara Traub, who is best known as the photographer who created some of the most recognizable images of Burning Man" - Laughing Squid

"Barbara's Burning Man photo collection is great and will take you on a journey through this ephemeral world. Ethnicity, extravaganza, pop culture, eroticism, nudity, free land: the Burning Man is something unique" - Fine Art TV

"Traub's evocative photography displays the human connections established by the attendees with each other, the art they produce and the beautiful landscape of the Nevada desert...From the sensitive nude photographs of people in all manner of color and caked in mud to cars retrofitted to be art on wheels and the temporary temples which dot the desert floor." - TakeGreatPictures.com

"The images capture what this event is about more than words can... it's avant-garde at its best." --artfuture.com

"Barbara Traub has been taking photos of the scene for years, considering her role part of the performance. The vivid photos bear witness to the creativity and freedom expressed by participant. This book tells many thousands of words' worth of stories." - MocoLoco

"Although finding the surreal at Burning Man may be as easy as finding materialism in Las Vegas, Traub seems to have an affinity for the unusual and the sublime." --Micro Publishing News

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.