Desert to Dream

"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
“Barbara Traub, who is best known as the photographer who created some of the most recognizable images of Burning Man.” — mikl-em, Laughing Squid
"Holiday Bookshelf—Top 10 Pick"—Nevada Magazine
This groundbreaking photo collection now features twelve years of Burning Man. In the beginning, it was a display of alternative art. Today it influences contemporary culture around the globe. Celebrated photographer Barbara Traub captures the zeitgeist in a cornucopia of amazing structures, ingenious artifacts, and eye-popping costumes.
Contributions from filmmaker Les Blank; Burning Man founder Larry Harvey; Star Trek’s Spock, Leonard Nimoy; and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti help illuminate Traub’s unique perspective on this singular festival that attracts more than fifty thousand people annually.
The first edition sold out. This revised edition includes sixteen more pages and two-dozen new photographs from 2006 and 2009, and appeals to participants and artists worldwide.
"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." – Publishers Weekly
“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