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Two weeks ago, when I wrote a post about photographing sandstorms at Burning Man, I got flooded with questions — or to be more accurate, mainly one question — how do you keep your camera clean in that environment? The answer is, I don’t. I have photographed at Burning Man for seven years and each year I inflicted varying degrees of damages on both the camera and the lens. My Nikon D2X was built like a tank so it survived, but by the end of its life it looked like it’d been through a world war and a zombie apocalypse. Miraculously, it worked until its undignified death by cheap beer at the World Series. Though dutifully wrapped in a plastic bag throughout the festival, my 24-70 lens had to be repaired because of all the fine sand getting inside the mechanism. Moral of the story is, if you are OCD about keeping your equipment immaculately clean, best to leave your camera at home.
As I lamented previously, photographing at Burning Man is a difficult endeavor to begin with. The event is deceivingly photogenic and tough to capture in a way that’s not hackneyed to oblivion. Over seven years, I have taken only a handful of images that hint at the surreal experience inside this world’s largest sandbox for adults. The goal is to communicate a sense of wonder that makes even the most hardened skeptics gasp when first encountering the festival.
Many Burning Man photographs focus on the people, and to be more specific on good-looking Burners dressed the part. But if I see another image of a feather-clad model in fancy desert goggles posing in front of colossal letters spelling “BELIEVE” my soul will tear itself into shreds. While I understand the easy appeal, telling the story of the festival through such portraits is ineffective at best, irritating at worst. Instead of seducing the viewer into this world, it can repel, because no one really wants to find themselves in a dustier version of an exclusive Soho rooftop. But in a catch 22, the rest (and majority) of the people who are not as superficially decorative (as in, decked out in custom-made outfits costing thousands of dollars) are also not as photogenic and make for less exciting images. Unless approached with a unique idea and lots of caution, concentrating on people and portraits at Burning Man is a visual trap best to be avoided.
Then there are photos of all the partying — happy people dancing at sunrise and art cars shooting fire and lasers. While usually more interesting, most such images fail as well. Dancing in general is just as delightful to witness in person as it is tedious to see in photos. Dancing at Burning Man fares only marginally better. Once devoid of the larger context and confined by the edges of the photograph, the resulting images look like any other party at any other festival.
So, then, what’s left? In a word, a struggle. A struggle to condense the enormity of the experience into one photograph that conveys the visceral awe of the festival. I have found that the best way to achieve this is to play with a sense of scale. In such photos, the individuals are overwhelmed by the space and reduced to tiny participants in a vast video game. Identities are erased, sacrificed. A vague sense of ritual permeates the photos in the same way it does the entire festival. And I don’t mean that in any pseudo-spiritual, cosmic bullshit type of sense. Being surrounded by intricate feats of imagination, created with enormous effort for no other purpose than play and destroyed right after (all the big structures are burned at the end of the week) activates a magical sense of wonder and belonging. Being one of a thousand people standing in a circle and witnessing a massive wooden temple being burned, all while in total silence, was as close to a ritual as I’ve ever experienced.
Of course, anyone could prove me wrong by bringing back the most incredible Burning Man series full of portraits and dancing, sunrises and lasers. It’s not impossible to capture these subjects in a transcendent image, just improbable. And maybe I was way too focused on enjoying the festivities to really care about photography. I can see myself coming back simply for the purpose of taking photos and devising a strategy to finally hack the visual story of the festival. But I’d probably be too seduced by the place itself, once again. As I’ve said in the opening paragraph of this post, it’s best to leave the camera at home.
Part 1, Burning Man — The Desert's Wildest Party as an Oasis of Solitude
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