Product Description

For one week in August the Burning Man Festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert brings people together in a spirit of self-reliance and creativity. Art has become the defining feature of Burning Man, as the festival continues to be a testing ground for a growing circle of artists seeking engaged audiences. Their most compelling works are large-scale constructions that are burned at the end of the festival, and radically altered vehicles, or “art cars.”

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. For more than a decade, A. Leo Nash has been creating a photographic document of this work, and in his photographs we see the wellspring of a new art movement.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42341 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Nash's understated black and white photography gives an unexpected and intimate glimpse into Burning Man, the art-centric festival-community ("essentially a temporary city... of up to forty-thousand people") erected on an isolated stretch of Nevada desert every fall. Though it's known as much for hedonistic carousing as for art (if not moreso), Nash has been sleeping through the all-night parties for more than a decade so he can rise early and shoot artwork in the desert's morning light. More than a hundred of his stripped-down images are collected here, a strange and beautiful catalog of the structures, vehicles, monuments and performances dreamed up in the middle of nowhere. Writer and psychonaut Daniel Pinchbeck provides a brief introduction, but Nash's images are better complemented by his own plainspoken commentary, which focuses on the hard realities of putting on an event of Burning Man's magnitude: hazardous road trips, labor-intensive construction, infrastructure management, crowd control and the final clean up. Nash's singular, idiosyncratic perspective proves charming and frank; for instance, Nash isn't shy about tensions within the community (mainly between those who come early to build and latecomers who take the effort for granted). It's easy to imagine a lively collaborative volume on the festival, but by keeping things restrained, Nash provides a personal tour that gets to the heart of the spectacle.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
A. Leo Nash is a photographer whose work has been widely exhibited. He is a creative participant at Burning Man and collaborates with the artists whose work he documents. He lives in Oakland, California.

Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. He lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Its the art, stupid
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.

good photos deep in drivel
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.

Picstures Worth Crying For
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.