Scantily clad passion-fest in a secluded desert? Sign us up. As a matter of fact, we’re so FOMO-filled by Burning Man that for the past couple of years, we’ve reported on it in a variety of ways. Everything at Black Rock City seems, from an armchair festival-goer’s perspective, downright fascinating. Except the bug scourges, that bit sucks.
We’ve written about celeb happenings on The Playa, big changes for the future, and must see photos, but we’ve never actually shared the work of someone who snapped pictures while fully immersed in the whole scene. To remedy that, we sat down with famed Burning Man photographer Scott London (@Scott.London) and picked apart what it’s actually like to photograph the world’s most famous short-term (soon to be long-term) conscious community.
He was nice enough to answer our questions about gear, partying, and how the hell he keeps playa dust out of his equipment.
Can you describe the experience of photographing Burning Man?
One of the things I love about Burning Man is that it’s completely participant-driven. Unlike traditional festivals, where there are DJs lined up, performances scheduled, or activities provided, everybody at Burning Man brings their own entertainment. It could be a massive art installation, a desert ship to ride around on, or a theme camp offering Tantric workshops, monkey chanting, exotic cocktails or any of a dozen other offerings. Or it could be performance art, like fire-dancing, roue cyr, or stilt-walking. Or showing off your skills as a body-painter, tattoo artist, or costume designer. Doesn’t matter. What this creates is an atmosphere of freeform creativity where everybody is a participant rather than a spectator. Everybody at the event contributes something to the overall experience.
The other thing that makes Burning Man unique is that it takes place in a remote and other-worldly setting — a dry lakebed in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more beautiful, strange and evocative landscape. The playa is absolutely flat and nearly white, covered as it is in hard packed alkali dust. At Burning Man, it’s like everything is set against a white and pristine natural backdrop. It makes for very unusual and often surreal imagery.
What does Burning Man mean to you?
When Burning Man got its start in San Francisco in the 1980s, it was nothing more than a bonfire on a beach. Now it draws some 70,000 people from all over the world. Many of them come for the same reason that they came in the beginning — to dance, to celebrate, and to burn stuff. But the people who started the event wanted to do more than just throw a great party. At heart, I think, they wanted to create a venue where people could discover, explore, and give expression to their creative instincts, whatever form they happened to take. That spirit is very much alive at Burning Man and it’s one of the reasons I love the event so much. For many participants, breaking out of the confines of old identities and expressing themselves in new and inventive ways is a deeply transformative experience. I think this shows through in some of my photos, especially the portraits.
From a tech standpoint, what are you shooting with? And how do you keep your gear dust-free? I’ve heard horror stories of people ruining their gear on the Playa.
I’m a longtime Canon photographer and shoot with a handful of DSLRs. Every year I bring out four or five of them, each with a dedicated lens. I avoid changing lenses because of the harsh conditions — especially the dust which, as you say, can cause problems when it gets inside the camera.
That said, I think people obsess about equipment too much. My gear is nice, but nothing out of the ordinary. At Burning Man, my choice of gear is a matter of convenience and necessity. It has to be light so I can carry it around on my shoulder all day. It has to be rugged so that it can handle the harsh conditions. And it has to be versatile so it can be used in a variety of settings, some of them quite challenging — like hanging out of an ultralight or suspended above a sea of people in cherry-picker.
What is the process of photographing festival goers like? Are they mostly open to it?
Most Burning Man participants are open to being photographed, especially if you take the time to make a personal connection. I’ve found that approaching people has gotten easier over the years as my confidence has grown. In the beginning, I was wary of getting too close to my subjects. Today, less so. The problem, of course, is that everybody is a photographer now and there are simply too many cameras at the event.
This year I thought to myself more than once, “we’re all standing around pointing our phones in the air instead of enjoying the moment.”
As a photographer, do you need to separate yourself a bit from the party in order to get an objective shot or do you throw yourself in there?
That’s a great question. My training as a journalist emphasized objectivity, the idea that your job is to faithfully record events and document people’s lives, but without interfering or affecting them in any significant way. This approach works well for photojournalists covering the news. But it doesn’t work at Burning Man. In fact, it collides with one of the essential principles of the event—that each of us is a participant and not a spectator.
This means I’ve had to unlearn some of what I was taught as a journalist. I had to step out from behind the camera and learn to create images, not just stand on the sidelines and wait for something interesting to happen. So my approach is more participatory today. My best images come from working with people to try to create compelling images. It’s more collaborative, more creative, and a lot more enriching.
Do you have any tips for people who’d like to try their hand at photographing the festival?
Burning Man is now so big that you can’t even begin to cover the whole event. So what will you focus on? The art installations? The mutant vehicles? The dance venues? The theme camps? Perhaps you want to focus on people, but which ones? There are some 70,000 people on the scene, so how will you know which ones to point your camera at? My advice is to start by asking yourself, “What do I want to convey here? What do I want to capture? What moves me?”
Too often I see photographers just shooting aimlessly without giving any thought to what they want to say with their images. Sometimes they succeed in making a beautiful or amazing photo, something to share with their friends or put on their wall. But for a set of photographs to really come alive, they have to express something, tell a story of some kind. It’s up to each of us as photographers to decide—or perhaps discover—what that is.
What have you learned while photographing the festival?
As a photographer, I feel that our culture is already saturated with imagery. We see hundreds if not thousands of images every day. They flicker by in an unending stream and we barely stop to take notice. This means that it’s very difficult as a photographer to make an impact, to touch people and say something new, with a single image.
I don’t know of any good way around this problem. But as a photographer, I’m always looking for moments that contain some element of the unexpected. I think those have a greater chance of speaking to people. The most powerful photographs, I believe, are those that surprise you and perhaps awaken in you a sense of possibility.
Burning Man is a wonderful place to make these kinds of images because things are never quite what they seem there. The foreign and the familiar are always coming together in new and arresting ways.
What’s next for you?
A new and expanded edition of our book Burning Man: Art on Fire was just published last month. It was a collaboration with writer Jennifer Raiser and fellow photographer Sidney Erthal. The book contains over 200 photographs taken over a period of twelve years, along with detailed descriptions of the art installations and mutant vehicles at the event. We’re very excited about it and looking forward to upcoming book events, public talks, and even a couple of exhibitions associated with its release.
The Mad Ones is a reference to a famous quote from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: “…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ ”
Watch this series for interviews and profiles with people doing big, wild, bold, creative things with their lives. #TheMadOnes
