Desert to Dream: A Decade of Burning Man Photography
Traub presents 10 years' worth of lavish color photography on the annual counterculture festival, Burning Man. The first Burning Man was held on a San Francisco beach and attended by a couple dozen people. Today it takes place in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and is known as the Black Rock Arts Festival. Every year Black Rock City is erected around a giant wooden statue that is immolated to much fanfare at the end of a weeklong bacchanal. Traub's images capture the festival's spirit in lots of zany costumes and art installations celebrating off-kilter takes on contemporary culture and the participants' flights of fancy. The slight accompanying text carries the highest -countercultural-subcultural pedigree, thanks -to the authors: celebration film documentarian Les Blank and Beat poetry icon Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Of course, there are some naked folk in the photographs, though their nudity is hardly gratuitous, what with all the body paint and artfully applied mud. Good visual fun and countercultural documentation, this is vibrant stuff in these grim days, a must for pop-culture collections.Mike TribbyCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved