Back from the Big Burn
Hello Readers! I do believe that this is the longest I have gone without posting here, since I started this thing back in 2008. Oh and what to say. I’ve been away at Burning Man, my first time back in five years. And it was amazing.
The event has grown a lot in those five years. I knew that it had, but seeing it first hand was really something. My travelmate and I got in the Sunday morning before the event was formally started, and that night the city was already built up to where I remember seeing it on Wednesdays or even Thursdays past. They say that it is slowly becoming a two-week event, rather than just the one. The sheer numbers that come out, pretty much require some sort of staggering. We maxed out this year with more than 55,000 in attendance. That’s a lot to put on one single road leading out there.
As usual, the city was a veritable cornucopia of sights and sounds to delight, inspire, annoy, impress, and just be taken in. My favorite art pieces this year were probably the pier, and the skeletons. The pier was quite simply a pier built out into the middle of the dried lake bed, fully equipped with a tackle shop, where a man talked to us about time shares, and fishing poles with glowsticks on the end so that one could go hippy fishing if they so desired. They even had row boats docked up around the sides that one could go sit in, and a nice subtle sound effects track playing waves and seagulls to further the ambiance.
The skeletons were a different kind of piece. From a distance it looked like a ferris wheel of skeletons. But when people heaved on the big heavy ropes to either side of the wheel, the wheel would turn. And if the wheel gathered enough speed, it would trigger a strobe light. And if you happened to be playing with the piece at night, this would trigger an animation effect to the eye, and you would literally watch a skeleton at the base of the wheel rowing. It was so cool. Someone captured this image of the piece by day. But the real magic of it just couldn’t be captured in any still image. I think that’s part of what I liked so much about it. And y’know, skeletons!
The piece that caught me most by surprise though, was certainly the Trojan Horse. Every year I’ve ever been out to Burning Man, there has always been some moment of break down, something that just gets you. This year for me, it was the Trojan Horse. And I know, lousy journalist that I am, I didn’t photograph any of that one either, but there are some nice shots up in this Mail Online collection of it, including this Associated Press shot.
I believe it stood about forty feet tall. And Friday night we all walked over to see it burn. While we waited, I found myself wrapped up in a conversation with a truly amazing woman about what it all really meant. Does it matter that people build such awesome things out in the desert for a week, or should we be putting our efforts into something bigger, something further reaching. Or are we perhaps reaching further with the art created at this one event than is readily apparent. Well, the horse was lit, and suddenly I found myself completely emotionally sucker punched. Somewhere in the lighting, the piece stopped being a big giant wooden horse that some people built, but became utterly symbolic of a horse I lost years back. But as difficult as that moment was, I still feel so very fortunate to have been surrounded by the people I was just then and there. And yes, Djinnaya, I suppose the art we make out there does matter.
So you may be wondering at this point, what did I get around to photographing out there, if not any of the pieces I’ve been talking about so far. Well, I’ve always been mostly drawn to photographing people. It’s the people that really make any event for me. And I also spent a little time photographing The Man, and The Temple.
The rest of my posted photographs can be found here.
http://snapshotgenius.com/gallery/bman2011
I am so glad to have been able to make it out again this year. And I am so grateful to those people who helped me get there, and who were a part of the experience with me. Yay!