Buy new:
$18.00$18.00
$5.00
delivery:
June 15 - 16
Ships from: Friends of Redwood City Public Library Sold by: Friends of Redwood City Public Library
Buy used: $17.08
Other Sellers on Amazon
FREE Shipping
& FREE Shipping
92% positive over last 12 months
& FREE Shipping
63% positive over last 12 months

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.


Desert to Dream: A Dozen Years of Burning Man Photography, Revised Edition Hardcover – August 23, 2011
Price | New from | Used from |
- Kindle
$14.95 Read with Our Free App - Hardcover
$18.00
Purchase options and add-ons
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
- Print length176 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherImmedium
- Publication dateAugust 23, 2011
- Dimensions10.5 x 1 x 11.5 inches
- ISBN-101597020265
- ISBN-13978-1597020268
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together

What do customers buy after viewing this item?
- Most purchasedin this set of productsThe Scene That Became Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Teach Us about Building Better CommunitiesCaveat Magister (Benjamin Wachs)Paperback
Editorial Reviews
Review
“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
“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."
“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
“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
“Barbara Traub, who is best known as the photographer who created some of the most recognizable images of Burning Man” - Laughing Squid
From the Inside Flap
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 Treks Spock, Leonard Nimoy, and beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti help to illuminate Traubs unique perspective on this dynamically evolving event.
This revised edition includes 16 more pages and two-dozen new photographs.
From the Back Cover
“Desert to Dream is an unprecedented photographic record of a decade of Burning Man celebrations…Traub worked on assignment for Wired’s cover story on Burning Man, was chief photographer for HardWired’s book Burning Man that was published the following year, and shot for Wired News in 2001 [and 2006].” ― wired.com
“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…Good visual fun and countercultural documentation, this is vibrant stuff in these grim days, a must for pop-culture collections.” ― Mike Tribby, Booklist, American Library Association
“[Desert to Dream] is often downright beautiful…It’s a lovely book, beautifully shot, surreal and random and appropriately odd.” ― Mark Morford, SFGate.com
About the Author
Born in 1948, Larry Harvey grew up on a small farm on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. In the late 1970s he moved to San Francisco, and soon discovered the city's thriving underground art scene. In 1986 he founded Burning Man at a local beach, and guided its progress from that moment until his death in 2018. Larry was Founding Board Member and Chief Philosophic Officer of Burning Man Project. He scripted and co-curated Burning Man's annual art theme and collaborated with artists in creating aspects of the art theme and the design of Black Rock City. Larry also wrote articles and essays for the Project's website. As spokesperson for Burning Man, he was frequently interviewed by reporters, and lectured on subjects as diverse as art, religion, civic planning and the rise of cyber-culture in the era of the Internet. Larry was also a political planner, supervising the organization's lobbying efforts and frequently attending meetings with state, county and federal agencies.
Les Blank was a renowned independent filmmaker, whose poetic work offers intimate, idiosyncratic glimpses into the lives, culture, and music of passionate people at the periphery of American society. Topics have included Cajun, Mexican, Polish, Hawaiian, and Serbian-American music and food traditions, Afro-Cuban drummers, Texas bluesmen, Appalachian fiddlers, flower children, garlic, and gap-toothed women. Blank was perhaps best known for his feature-length “Burden of Dreams” (1982), documenting the chaotic production of Werner Herzog’s 1982 film “Fitzcarraldo” in the jungles of South America. Honored with a Criterion DVD edition and winner of the British Academy Award, Ebert called the film “one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made about the making of a movie.”
A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues, Ferlinghetti's poetry counters an elitist conception of art and the artist's role in the world. Although his poetry is often concerned with everyday life and civic themes, it is never simply personal or polemical, and it stands on his grounding in tradition and universal reach. He was named San Francisco's Poet Laureate in August 1998. Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) continues to be one of the most popular poetry books in the U.S., with over 1,000,000 copies in print.
Product details
- Publisher : Immedium; Revised edition (August 23, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 176 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1597020265
- ISBN-13 : 978-1597020268
- Item Weight : 3 pounds
- Dimensions : 10.5 x 1 x 11.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,627,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #367 in Celebration & Event Photography
- #3,255 in Pop Culture Art
- #5,707 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Top reviews from other countries




Das Buch ist eine fotografische Annäherung an das Phänomen Burning Man.
Ehrlich und nicht auf sexistische Abbildungen hübscher Mädchen focusiert.
Was ist freies Denken, das sich für eine Zeit materialisiert, auf einem wüsten Ort und
schließlich befreiend für Neues im Feuer verschwindet. Ein persönlicher fotografischer Ansatz.
Es zeigt ein Stück gelebten Idealismus und die anfängliche Euphorie des Festivals.
Die Aspekte jedes zu groß werdenden Festivals werden noch nicht berührt.
