Customer Reviews

Burning Man: Art in the Desert

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Nash is a great photographer, with a clear, timeless vision that you can literally feel. His photographs hold you and keep you looking into them, farther. This is another volume in the work of our best contemporary photographers, and an extraordinary record of art and a place we might never have otherwise seen.

Burning Man is often described as being indescribable, and for good reason. So much of the art created there is ephemeral, lasting just a few days before burning to the ground. An entire city of 30,000 rises, falls, and disappears. To some, it feels like a heartbeat, and to others, a lifetime. To describe it in words is nearly impossible, when so much quickly becomes the elusive memory of memories.

Through Nash's remarkable photographs, we see a decade of visionary work and creativity that physically existed for only a moment. Whether you've been to Burning Man or not, this book will fill you with awe, and longing for the place.

I bought the book because I like black and white photos and because my son has attended Burning Man and worked for the corporation that creates the event in 2003. My intention is to give him the book; but, I decided to read the text before sending it off. The intro is long winded drivel (and at the time of this writing, the writer of the introduction has wasted valuable real estate on this product page with some self serving crap from his blog; who wants to wade down the page to get to the real reviews?) and the text by the photog is self indulgent in the style of the "burners." The notion that this event is somehow "spontaneous" is what really makes me laugh. A more apt description would be something on the order of "this is my personal journal and musings on this ongoing "spontaneous" event, plus some photos" The pictures are well made, and the presentation with a slipcover is nicely done, which is what rescues the book.

This is seriously one of the coolest books I've ever seen in my life. I've never been to Burning Man (wouldn't want to), but these pictures are AMAZING. It might have been worth enduring desert discomfort dust storms and camping just to see the 2996 "Uchronia" structure-- wow.

I wish this book had been better. Sadly, there is a strange unnatural quality to the photographs that has nothing to do with the event and everything to do with the photographic choices and skills.

The photos are quite dark and underexposed, in a way that does not work. Leo Nash apparently prefers to stay well away from tones that are anywhere near white. The result is that numerous art works look dilapidated, junky and dirty. Similarly, his tendency to use a fairly dark sky tone makes the scene appear overcast and gloomy when a close examination often reveals it to be bright, broad daylight.

Quite a few of of the photos have clumsy and painfully obvious dodging and burning, resulting, for example, in brightened haloes around the frame of a hammock car, and more that a few skies with sharp lines across them between unnatural dark and light levels. Moreover, the efforts to selectively lighten and darken put various elements out of balance with each other.

Compositionally, the photos are plain, rarely bringing out the best in the art work. There also tends to be a lot of distracting clutter in the background: negative space is rarely used well. Parts of the art works get cut off for no apparent reason. Sometimes the photos include the shadow of the photographer, though not in a Lee Friedlander artistic way. Strange use of wide angle lenses makes for some very bowed horizons (the concave horizons are really bad) as well as distorted subjects. People are rare, and somehow they never seem happy or appealing (they more often seem vaguely repulsive). You will not find anything of the communal atmosphere at the actual event. You will not find yourself motivated to go into the hot, dusty Nevada desert in high summer to see this stuff.

I hate to say it, but color would have been a better choice. Yes, I know, everyone shoots color at Burning Man, but black and white, especially as Mr. Nash did it, gets the opposite of the vibrance people go the Burning Man to experience. Basically, black and white emphasizes other compositional elements, so the gritty texture of the dirt and building materials really stands out and makes them seem repulsive without color. Strangely enough, he chose color for the cover.

The pictures are much better than Daniel Pinchbeck's writing, which despite being fairly brief, is grandiose, flatulent buffoonery. Leo's writing is not so overblown and pretentious as Daniel's.

I found this book a bit of a disservice to the art and the event. Almost any online album of Burning Man photos is more exciting.

I just received this book as a gift. I immediatley sat down and slowly turned each page in amazement of what he has captured. I cried.

So much of the photogprahy of Burning Man is all glitz and surreal glamour, with a big measure of breast often thrown in. Yeah it's a big party with all sorts of wacky and interesting costumes and bright sights, but the real soul of the thing is the making of the art.

Public art is always a gift to its community. The type of art that has grown out there, especially in its scale and ambition, often demands substantial gifts from the community to exist. It is a sublime and outrageous feedback loop, the process and product of which have never been as clearly and deeply represented as in this luminous book.

The inner cover photo of a box of matches full of dust and containing not only matches but burnt stubs, cotter pins and a spring, is one of the most complete and lovely images of the spirit of these brave artists I have ever seen. If you can understand that photo you can probably understand the process of making art out there.

Leo Nash certainly does understand the process. By far the most revealing collection of Burning Man photos ever compiled, as close to a portait of the thing as you are likely to see.

For those unfamiliar with BURNING MAN, the promotional material for this annual unique art event is described here: 'Once a year, tens of thousands of participants gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert to create Black Rock City, dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, having left no trace whatsoever. ' Or in other places 'Art at Burning Man, like the experience of being there itself, is a way of being outside routine existence: People return home rejuvenated and inspired to seek ways to express the spirit of the festival in their everyday lives.' And as Wikipedia expands 'The event starts on the Monday before and ends on the day of the American Labor Day holiday. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy on Saturday evening. The event is described by many participants as an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance.' BURNING MAN: ART IN THE DESERT is as fine a documentation of this phenomenon as is available. The author is a photographer A. Leo Nash who with his funky photographic kinks has captured thirteen years of this week of art in the desert, and the results are exciting and rewarding.

This well designed and produced book offers insights into this ritual. The art created for this event varies from construction of found objects to three-dimensional sculptures brought or transported to the site for the fellow artists (and growing public of art lovers) to 'experience'. There is something about the light of the desert that transforms this work, making the whole seem more important than its component parts. And much of that art is due to Nash's experimental photography that has become very much a part of this episodic, temporary contemporary art exhibition/happening. Reading or viewing this beautifully slipcovered memento will likely result in an increased audience for this very fresh and invigorating art. Some of the works in the BURNING MAN have included the 1908 "The End" by Bob Marzewski, a very impressive huge sculpture of stacked blocks that spell out THE END. But the variety of what is here in this book will definitely entertain the reader and give further credence to the idea that great art can be of the moment, then dismantled and moved on. BURNING MAN says more about our current way of experiencing life than perhaps the artists and even A. Leo Nash expected. It is well worth the attention of everyone who craves creativity, even transient creative works. Grady Harp, February 10