“Art in an Ephemeral Age” is the theme of the Institute of Art and Ideas’ annual Art Festival at Hay in England, and among the many highlights this year is a look at Burning Man, perhaps the world’s preeminent gathering of ephemeral artists. Several discussion forums will tackle the subject of temporal art and performance artist Sarah Appleby will offer her own inimitable take on Burning Man.

Although I’m not able to attend the event, I was invited to exhibit some of my Burning Man photographs at the Globe, a converted church in Hay on Wye, which serves as the festival’s primary venue. The exhibit features over two dozen of my photos covering the last five years of the Burning Man festival. The show runs from November 13-28. More details here.

About a dozen of my photos from Burning Man 2009 appear in the October issue of Common Ground magazine. It’s a Bay Area-only publication, but you can view the full issue online at www.commongroundmag.com. My images begin on page 18.

Check out the spread here.

It was a beautiful and amazing week, wind and dust notwithstanding. Attendance was down by over ten percent this year — a first in the festival’s 24-year history — which made for a smaller and somewhat more intimate event. There was also a sense among many I spoke with that the vibe was more low-key this year. That said, much of the art was world class, the performances first-rate, the wacky fashion and outlandish costumes unforgettable, and the people of Black Rock City, well, more beautiful than ever.

One of the highlights of this year’s event was a small media gathering with, among others, Burning Man founder and director Larry Harvey. Always the man of ideas, he offered his thoughts on how the event has grown over the past quarter century and how it has come to embody a set of unique social, cultural and above all civic values. As Harvey likes to remind us, in his inimitable way, Burning Man is nothing if not a visionary experiment, one that can guide and inspire us to create stronger and more vibrant communities. (For more on this, see Five Things Cities Can Learn From Burning Man, a video clip on Time.com.)

It was an outstanding year for photography. I was part of the documentation team this year, a small crew of photographers charged with capturing the event for the Burning Man organization. In essence, it means I was one of those guys you love to hate on the playa — a photographer with a badge. Still, my approach to photography remains essentially the same it has always been, an attempt to record something of the beauty, the creativity, the whimsy, the madness and the sheer outrageous good fun of it all — if only in a small way to give something back.

I’ve pulled together a set of 100 personal favorites here:

• Burning Man 2009: A Photoessay

The Jesusita Fire took almost everyone by surprise when it began on the afternoon of May 5. It’s the third major wildfire in Santa Barbara in just nine months, and many here are still recovering from the devastating Tea Fire last November.

The blaze is still out of control and details are sketchy, but we know that dozens of homes have already been lost. I witnessed some of them go up in flames myself before being forced out by the authorities.

Here are some of my photos:

This image was taken from Painted Cave Road at 3:30 p.m. on May 5, just a couple of hours after the fire began. The trail of the smoke shows the typical sundowner pattern — blowing across the city and out to sea, just as the devastating Gap and Tea fires did last year.

The Jesusita Fire burns in the hills above Santa Barbara, California. Taken from Camino Cielo in the late afternoon on May 5, 2009. The small black dot in the center is a fixed wing aircraft surveying the hotspots.

Smoke and ash darken the sky above Santa Barbara as night falls on day one of the fire.

On the evening of the first day, the fire was still confined to a relatively small area of less than 200 acres, as seen in this long exposure taken from Elings Park.

Thick smoke drifts out over the city on the second day of the fire, as seen in this shot from Las Tunas Road on the Riviera.

The flames rage in the hills perilously close to Santa Barbara’s historic mission. It seems fitting that local firefighters and police would use the spot as an ad hoc staging ground.

Santa Barbara County firefighters gather at the mission to plan their next assault as the fire continues its spread east and south toward the city.

Fanned by strong winds, flames and smoke wreak havoc in the densely populated neighborhood above Foothill Road, just west of Mission Canyon Road.

Huge flames ravage the foothills above Mountain Drive.

Putrid smoke and ash choked the skies and obscured the sun, bathing the city in an eerie red light.

A chopper dumps water over a structure burning on Mountain Drive.

Intense sundowner winds scatter and fan the flames, as seen in this photo taken from Stanwood Drive.

The size and sheer force of the inferno was staggering.

A terrifying firestorm erupts in the hills above Mission Canyon.

A palm tree scorched in the recent Tea Fire stands on a now vacant lot on Conejo Road, as smoke and ash from the new Jesusita Fire darken the skies above.

The eastern edge of the Jesusita Fire was still burning out of control late on Wednesday night. This photo was taken on Ortega Ridge Road in Summerland.

Strong offshore winds continued to fan the flames of the Jesusita Fire above Santa Barbara, as seen in this image taken at Elings Park.

Intense smoke and ash covered the city of Santa Barbara as the Jesusita Fire continued to burn on several fronts on Wednesday night.

Relatively calm winds during the morning and afternoon of day three kept the Jesusita Fire confined mainly to the mountains near Cathedral Peak.

As the afternoon wore on, the winds intensified and fanned the flames westward.

A dark plume of drift smoke could be seen all the way to Ventura and beyond. This photo was taken from Carpinteria at 6:30 p.m. just as the sundowner winds kicked up and stoked the fires anew.

Strong early evening winds fanned the flames and sent black smoke into the skies above Santa Barbara. This image was shot from Ortega Hill at sunset.

As the sun set on the third day of the Jesusita Fire, the sky turned ominously red and ash started falling like snowflakes. The palmettos on Channel Drive can be seen bending in the strong wind.

By 9:00 o’clock on Thursday, the fire was raging out of control across a wide swath of the Santa Barbara foothills, from San Roque Canyon to the east all the way to Highway 154 to the west.

The Jesusita Fire continued to burn in Santa Barbara on Friday, though lower temperatures and relatively calm winds kept the flames confined mainly to the hills above the city. After sunset, the skies were still dark with drift smoke and ash, as seen in this image taken from Butterfly Beach.

By Friday evening, the Jesusita Fire had consumed 8,400 acres and cut a swath some five miles wide from the ridges above Montecito all the way to Painted Cave.

The Jesusita Fire continued to rage in the hills above Montecito on Friday evening.

Flames from the Jesusita Fire lit up the evening sky above Santa Barbara on Friday evening, as seen in this image taken at the Andree Clark Bird Refuge.

Another personal favorite, this one of the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California. The three small islands in the foreground make up Anacapa, the large island behind it is Santa Cruz, and in the distance are Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands. The image was taken through the windshield of a Cessna on a return flight from Catalina Island with my pilot friend Sam. A special day.

I Madonnari was the name given to street painters in 16th- and 17th-century Italy, itinerant artists who traveled from town to town and city to city rendering images of the Madonna on sidewalks and in public squares. Like street musicians, the “Madonna painters” supported themselves by small donations — usually coins thrown to them by appreciative passers-by and festival-goers. Using chalks and handmade pastels, the artists sometimes created works of remarkable majesty and scale. But the art was always ephemeral, vanishing with the first rain.

Today, the tradition of street painting lives on in cities across Europe and in a growing number of communities in North America. 2009 marks the 22nd anniversary of the I Madonnari Festival in Santa Barbara, California. When it started in 1987, it was the only street painting event of its kind in the United States. Today, the three-day event, held each Memorial Day weekend in the plaza in front of Santa Barbara’s historic mission, draws crowds of 25,000 or more from around the world. The art ranges from small chalk drawings by local artists to large-scale street murals by nationally recognized street painters. There is also a special chalk-drawing area for young artists.

I Madonnari is a fundraiser for the Children’s Creative Project, an innovative program that provides visual and performing arts education to public schools in and around Santa Barbara. At a time when arts education has been all but eliminated from school budgets, entrepreneurial communities have to take matters into their own hands. The I Madonnari Festival represents one of the more successful such initiatives — a community-building effort aimed at both making art and ensuring its survival in the local school system.

This photoessay brings together images from 2006-2008. Some of them are included in the cover story of the Spring 2009 Broughton Quarterly, a travel and lifestyle magazine.

View photos »

A personal favorite, this one shot at the Heat the Street Faire in San Francisco, October 2008.

Most people in the entertainment world are busy looking forward to the Academy Awards on February 22. But some of us are still looking back on the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which just wrapped up on February 2. 

The two events are not unrelated. The ten-day festival in Santa Barbara kicked off on January 22, the same day the Academy Award nominations were announced. As it happened, a surprising number of Oscar-contenders were already booked for appearances in Santa Barbara — either as award recipients, presenters, participants, judges, or simply as celebrities making an appearance. 

It’s a mark of how well the festival is doing that it consistently manages to spotlight the year’s most significant films, performances, and personalities, often way ahead of others in the industry.

Highlights of this year’s festival included awards tributes to Kate Winslet (who received a nod for best actress for her performance in “The Reader”) Penelope Cruz (nominated for best supporting actress in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) and comeback of the year, Mickey Rourke, (nominated for best actor for his performance in “The Wrestler”).

Richard Jenkins, who also received a best actor nod, was joined by fellow Virtuoso honorees Michael Shannon, nominated for best supporting actor for “Revolutionary Road,” Viola Davis, best supporting actress for “Doubt,” and best actress nominee Melissa Leo for “Frozen River” (below).

It was my second year covering the event. Some more of my photos are gathered here.

Some of my photographs are included in a show, opening today, in Santa Rosa, California. The exhibition, “Bringing Back the Fire,” is a celebration of art and community at the annual Burning Man festival. According to the show’s press release, Burning Man “turns part of Black Rock Desert in Nevada into the ‘world’s largest outdoor art gallery’ for one week each August. Much of the art shown on the site is intended to burn — but many pieces survive, to be seen again. This exhibit celebrates some of these, and the community of participants who have created them.” The show runs through March 22, 2008 at the Santa Rosa Junior College Art Gallery.

The 2008 festival, which ran from January 24 to February 3, drew some 70,000 people and featured over 200 screenings, along with an impressive line-up of tributes, award shows, and panels with industry insiders. But the big story, as always, revolved around the celebrities, the beautiful people who came to town and, for a few days, transformed the place into the epicenter of the entertainment world. I was on a different assignment in Miami and missed the first few days of the event, including award presentations for Cate Blanchett and Javier Bardem. But I was lucky enough to get a front-row seat at the Directors Panel, a session that crackled with talent, intelligence, fast wit, and wicked one-liners. This slideshow pulls together some of my favorite images from the festival.

Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007. They were in Oslo last month to accept the award and take part in three full days of festivities. The Nobel events coincided with the climate conference in Bali, which made the coverage particularly interesting and timely this year. Rarely has the international spotlight been focused more intently on the question of global warming.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Al Gore drew a parallel between leaders who ignore the climate crisis and those who failed to act as Nazi Germany rearmed before World War II. “Too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: ‘They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent,’” Gore said. He likened the current “planetary emergency” to wartime. “We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war.” Strong words. A powerful lecture. 

It was my fifth year covering the Oslo events. More photos and text here.