From the Back Cover
“Soon after relocating from Baltimore to San Francisco in 1994, Barbara Traub made her first trip to Burning Man, and she and the rest of the world have never been the same. Over the next decade, Traub became one of the festival’s most prominent photographers [and thus one of its unofficial publicists], having her shots from the desert transmitted back to civilization via Mondo 2000, Wired, and numerous other outlets.” ― The Onion
“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
Barbara Traub is a photographer and multimedia artist, whose work has been exhibited at venues worldwide, including the San Francisco Arts Commission, Xerox PARC, Cooper Union in New York, the Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles, Houston Fotofest, Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, and the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute. Her photography of Burning Man has appeared in publications such as Wired, Spiegel Online, Photo District News, San Francisco Chronicle, and New Age. Chief photographer for HardWired's book Burning Man, she curated the 2004 “Art of Burning Man” at Photo SF. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, she resides in San Francisco, California.
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.
