Burning Man (Hardwired) [Hardcover]

Barbara Traub (Author), John Plunkett (Author), Janelle Brown (Author), Brad Wieners (Author)

Book Description

Series: Hardwired | Publication Date: April 1997

In 1955, The Family of Man envisioned humanity in its emerging global village. Now, Burning Man captures humanity celebrating newly found opportunities, an explosion of expression, the deep desire to create, and the ecstatic rediscovery of the body in a networked world. Award-winning designer John Plunkett combines hundreds of incredible photos with six essays to showcase the Digital Revolution's infectious optimism for a better world. Full-color photos.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Wired magazine's book division, HardWired, has taken the rich color process that gives their newsstand editions such impact and put it to even better use here, producing a volume of full-page photographs uninterrupted by text or the eye-candy layout that make Wired so amusing and difficult to read. This book features work by nearly a dozen photographers documenting the Black Rock Arts Festival, better known as Burning Man. This annual event draws thousands of revelers to a desolate stretch of desert for a few days of performance art, naked frolicking, and a bizarre, mock auto-da-fé wherein the giant wood and neon Burning Man is destroyed in the culmination of this festival of images. Sixteen pages of text separate the daylight photos from those taken at night, and the endpapers, prints of the cracked and empty desert surface, neatly wrap this exquisitely beautiful package.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 164 pages
• Publisher: Hardwired; 1st edition (April 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888869135
• ISBN-13: 978-1888869132
• Product Dimensions: 13.6 x 9.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,379,509 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some great images, but lots missing., August 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Burning Man (Hardwired) (Hardcover)

As a longtime participant in Burning Man, I looked forward to the publication of this book with eager anticipation. It's a lovely volume, and has plenty of dramatic and artsy images to show off to your friends who ask "What the heck is this Burning Man thing?"

What's missing however, are many aspects of individual challenge and participation that are central to life on the Playa. The Camps, the communities, the building and the clean up, and the daily life issues we all face living on a blank canvas in the desert are largely ignored in favor of the art aspect of the event. There are very few images of the Burn, the moment of release, and that makes it feel incomplete.

Now, don't get me wrong! This is a lovely book, well-photograped and well-made, it just feels to me more like a slick representation rather than an access point to the whole event. Though, with WIRED involved, that makes sense as well. I love having this book, and would recommend it to anyone who has lived in Black Rock City.

I wouldn't be without this volume on my shelves.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars High school yearbook for freaks, July 13, 2003

By 

Adrian Roberts (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Burning Man (Hardwired) (Hardcover)

Let's face it, when they start making coffee table books about a really cool, artsy, ostensibly underground, non-commercial event, you know the writing's on the wall for said event's hip quotient. So needless to say, I had a real negative feeling about this book before I even looked at it. I was opposed to its existance purely on principal. "Wired is trying to make money off of Burning Man," I thought, incredulous. And the Burning Man people actually approved! Travesty!

I must admit it though -- it's gorgeous. Stunning really. Beautifully designed, with huge, full-bleed photos-both color and black-and-white-on every page. Flipping through the book, there seems to be a good representative sampling of Black Rock City culture circa 1990-1996: Clichéd images of naked, painted bodies dancing. That goddamned Java Cow. Art cars. Colorfully-costumed participants. Moody black-and-whites of the Man. The usual pics of naked people caked with mud. It's even presented in somewhat of an order, with all the daytime images slowly leading into photos taken at dusk. Then there's the requisite sixteen pages of editorial pontificating, before heading off into the book's "climax," which mirrors the climax of the event itself with its final eighteen photos all taken during Burn night.

The images, for the most part, are stunning--although anyone can tell you that it seems damn near impossible to take a bad photo out on the playa. I especially liked Barbara Traub's very artful, often-posed, black-and-whites. Instead of merely documenting the event, she seems to use the playa as her own photography studio, producing incredibly unique images.

As for the editorial content, it makes for a good, hour-long read. Naturally, everyone tries to explain what Burning Man is, without ever really nailing it down. Such is the nature of the event. Larry Harvey spells it all out in his oral history of Burning Man. Bruce Sterling describes his family's vacation at Burning Man, in his hysterical, and ultimately heartwarming piece, "Variation On a Theme Park (Taking the Kids to Burning Man)" Erik Davis' "Here is Post-Modern Space" is alternately intellectual jabbering and snarky commentary. But far and away my favorite piece was "Me, I Didn't Burn A Thing," a refreshingly different perspective of Burning Man from Janelle Brown. She tells it like it is, writing: "I'm stuck in a limbo-land of exhaustion: I can't sleep because I've hardly moved all day, and I can't move because I've hardly slept. I lie in the eerie blue shade of our plastic tarpualin in a semi-lucid state, spray bottle in one hand, gin and tonic in the other." That is so it.

While certainly it's a great conversation piece for suckering in friends to go out with you to Burning Man next year, the biggest reason I like the book is because it functions as sort of a high school yearbook for all the freaks who went to Burning Man in the early to mid '90s.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Accurate, Artistic, Amazing, December 13, 2001

By 

"[e-mail]" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Burning Man (Hardwired) (Hardcover)

I've been to the event-- first as a citizen and later as part of the volunteer labor force, and I own this book. It's true (as other reviewers have stated) it is not "complete"-- in the sense that its focus is primarily visual. (There is so much more to Burning Man!) But it does a marvelous job with those visuals! Each page turned elicits one of the following thoughts: "Gad! I didn't see that! How could I possibly have missed that?" or something like "Ahhhh, I remember that evening on the Promenade-- and how mysterious the light was..."

The reader who found the images too "extreme," "surreal," and "fringe" has not been there-- or he/she forgot to look around, because this is what you will see if you venture out of your tent... It's easy to come up with remarkable images in this remarkable temporary city, and this book does a fine job of hinting at the world that is Black Rock City. Go ahead, whet your appetite...