burning man

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At the Burning Man festival in Nevada, you can do anything as long as it’s fantastic—and can be built and burnt in a week. Steve Double, a photographer and veteran burner, takes his camera for the first time. Text by Caroline Carter...

Riding a low-slung beachcruiser across the dazzlingly bright desert, you become part of a tribe voyaging through an unknown world. Two girls pedal past on a tandem, dressed identically in futuristic silver. Someone drives a scorpion across the road in front of you. An oversized VW campervan loaded with people stops to pass the time with a giant Beetle. A sunken ship lies half-buried in the dust. Music blaring from a thousand sound systems promises adventure in every direction.

Pictured: “Starlight” by Erich Remash from Seattle. Seven plywood stars lit from within and placed in the shape of the constellation of Orion: a piece of the heavens brought to earth

Navigation is guided by the hour hand of a clock, with the Man at the centre; from the sweeping horseshoe of camps, all roads lead to him, a hundred feet up on his pedestal. Beyond, at 12, is a seemingly endless expanse of flat dusty Playa, stretching towards distant mountains that rise up to the bright blue sky. I circle round him and swing left towards 9.45, where I have arranged to meet the photographer Steve Double at a tea party next to a 20-foot wooden bell tower.

Pictured: “Fisherman” by Tony Zorich from Lafayette, California. The prehistoric bed of Lake Lahontan that forms the Black Rock Desert is often the inspiration for site-specific works, leading to shoals of fish and fleets of boats

Tea is apt to be gin, served in a teapot, or Pimms with all the trimmings. A cricket match begins, but, in a rare moment of defeat, has to be abandoned as a dust storm swoops in and the fielders can no longer see the ball. Or the bowler. Masks and scarves are pulled up over mouths and noses to keep out the choking dust; goggles and glasses are donned to keep the super-fine particles out of eyes. Surreal vehicles loom out of the murk: “Neverwas Haul”, a three-storey Victorian house on wheels, pulls up and welcomes us aboard.

Pictured: “The Temple of Juno” by David Best and the Temple Crew. The Temple is a place where the citizens of Black Rock City come to remember those they have lost; on Sunday night it burns along with all the messages and totems that have been left inside it through the week. David Best, a professional artist for 40 years, was inspired by the sudden death of a fellow participant to create a space for the release of grief. He has made a number of temples, all constructed on site by a massive team of volunteers. After a few years as a burner, Best stopped making art for galleries at all, a decision he says gave him freedom to concentrate on the work that he really wanted to create

Wearing a red cowboy shirt and wig, Double is among friends from London, where he lived until he moved to Cairo. He remembers hearing about this event while working for Wired magazine in the mid-1990s, but it took another decade for the “stars to align” and for him to make it out here. “And it was, as they say, like coming home.”

Pictured: The EGO project by Laura Kimpton and Mike Garlington from San Francisco. These three enormous letters are covered in 7,500 hand cast plaster-of-Paris figurines, creating small shrines within the overall work itself. The raising of the artists’ metaphorical Ego and its burning within the barren landscape created a talking point and a resonant piece. Both of the creators have professional artistic practices, although the labour of love that bringing a work like this to Burning Man is, as one artist said, “a work of insanity”

This is Burning Man. Every year at the end of August, 50,000 people gather for an arts festival in the Black Rock Desert, a barren lakebed in northern Nevada. Together they build and populate a city, three miles across, that rises out of the dust before disappearing without a trace a week later. With a focus on self-expression in all its forms, Burning Man is one of the most extreme and beautiful festivals in the world.

Those who make it here must practise radical self-reliance by bringing along all the food, water and shelter that they need to survive in the desert. Everything must be shipped in and out along winding two-lane roads across an Indian reservation outside Reno, or into a temporary airport. Thousands of burners go far beyond the basics of survival by bringing art installations, bars, workshops, sound systems or food to feed their neighbours, creating a gift economy where nothing can be bought or sold bar the American staples of ice and coffee.

Pictured: “The Transformoney Tree” by Dadara from Amsterdam, one of the few political pieces at Burning Man. Participants brought a dollar bill and defaced it to glue on the tree, negating the monetary value but creating artistic value

People go to Burning Man for many different reasons, but one indisputable attraction is its photographic possibilities. Few photographers could resist the chance to capture the fantastical and sensory objects scattered across the Playa, or the artcars that roam the desert hosting parties. (Vehicles are only allowed in the festival proper if they don’t look like vehicles. They can be a giant, fire-spitting, mechanical octopus or a magic carpet or a super yacht, never just a car. If you can imagine it, someone will be driving it.) After the sun sets over the mountains that ring the site, the lights, explosions and fires burning like pyres through the night are irresistibly alluring.

Pictured: “Stella Octangula” by Denise Denise from Philadelphia, “a project born from the desire to manifest beauty with universal resonance”. “I don’t really consider myself an artist,” Denise says. This self-effacement is a common thread at Burning Man, a kind of punk ethos: anyone can do it

This is Double’s fourth burn and despite a 27-year career as a professional photographer he had never packed a camera until he was commissioned to shoot this photo essay. Feeling that having a lens between himself and the art would make the experience less immediate, he chose to participate in other art projects, such as the building of a giant anti-cathedral  defined only by its columns and arches in 2007, and the introduction of a London Routemaster bus which plied a time-tabled route around the site in 2009.

Pictured: “The Neverwas Haul” is a mobile, three-storey Victorian house with interior rooms and staircases. Kathy and Shannon O’Hare, from Vallejo, California, originally planned a post-apocalyptic Californian Victorian house on tank tracks roaming the desert floor. The tank tracks had to be ditched because they would damage the Playa. Instead “The Neverwas Haul” became a Casey Jones-style train

Bringing his own art to the Playa made Double consider the motives for others to overcome the physical and financial challenges and make their fantasy a reality. Many are not artists in the outside world. The Playa is not a gallery where art is shown and sold; your art is your gift to the community. Some pieces are listed in a guide produced for the event but with more than 300 placed installations, plus hundreds more, both mobile and static, the artists themselves can seem anonymous and secondary to the art. Much of the art, like the Man himself, is burnt before the end of the festival, giving the works a transience that seems odd given the time and effort put into their creation. Every year a new crop of subversive, technologically spectacular and interactive artwork appears, the culmination of months of work.

Pictured: “I never met the man who walks around with the 200-metre long trail of balloons every day,” Steve Double says. “Each one has a small LED light inside, so this ephemeral trail of lights drifts off into the night sky. And this is another common thread at Burning Man, a willingness to place the art in the environment with no ego or explanations, just one out of hundreds of works on the Playa, with an audience of thousands of people who may or may not stumble upon your particular piece”

Thus this was the project that finally brought out Double’s camera: a photo essay made distinct from others by meeting the people who created the work as well as capturing their work in situ. A natural choice for a portrait photographer. “I chose the art that I featured on a purely personal basis,” he says. “Either based on the spectacular or the emotional, or something beautiful or surreal in the given environment of the Playa.” Early starts to avoid the intense heat of the day were followed by long afternoons tracking down artists to visit and discuss their works.

Pictured: Rob Bell, from San Francisco, is not only a physics major but also a software programmer. He made “Zonotopia”, an intricate, mathematical structure, using geometry rather than screws or nails. The domes, he explained, are 3D projections of multi-dimensional cubes

Constructing (and photographing) art at Burning Man can be hard work. The dust that swirls across the site gets in your eyes, corrodes tools and can jam up a camera. The wind can pick up to 75mph (120kph), flattening camps and installations, reducing visibility to the length of your arm, shrouding the world in white and bringing everything to a standstill. Temperatures regularly exceed 38°C during the day and can drop to freezing at night. This is extreme hedonism. As an experienced burner and festival photographer, Double was relaxed about the challenges that the desert posed. His one concession was to wrap his Canon 40D camera in a trusty zip-lock bag while it wasn’t being used. But he was quite willing to bring it out in a dust storm to get the perfect shot. “I’ve never been that attached to kit. If it dies, it dies. C’est la vie.”

Pictured: “Zoa”, by Rebecca Anders and Jess Hobbs, was made by burning away a complex, organic wooden sculpture to reveal a flowering, fired-metal structure beneath. Rebecca and Jess have worked together for many years building fire sculptures for Burning Man and other events around the world, first as part of the Flaming Lotus Girls and now as part of The Flux Foundation. Not that they have managed to make it pay yet. “We have to work to make our art,” said Rebecca