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.

Just returned from the 2007 Burning Man festival. It was a beautiful and exhilarating week. This year I shot some 1,700 photos. Some of them were lost, and I’m still grieving about that, but there was enough for a photoessay, one that offers at least a small glimpe of the extraordinary art, the beautiful faces, and the brilliant colors of Black Rock City.

Go to photoessay

My photographs from Burning Man appear in several magazines currently on the newsstand. The new issue of Nevada Magazine includes a ten-page cover story titled “Images of Burning Man” with many of my photos. The latest Public Art Review features an article by Louis Brill titled “Burning Man Photographers.” The piece showcases the work of several photographers and makes the point that while public art is often the subject of Burning Man photos, some images from the event deserve to be called art in their own right. In addition, the French magazine Néosapiens includes a full-page photo of mine from the 2004 festival. Finally, the glossy German travel magazine ADAC Reisemagazin featured a pictorial on Burning Man a few months ago in a special issue on the American west. Sierra Magazine will also publish a photo of mine from last year’s festival in their upcoming issue.

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. This year marked the 20th 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. It is held each Memorial Day weekend in the plaza in front of Santa Barbara’s historic mission. The three-day event typically attracts some 25,000 visitors. 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.

View my photoessay here.

It’s a place of uncommon natural beauty, an inland oasis teeming with wildlife surrounded by unrelenting desert. But things are not quite what they seem at the Salton Sea. The lake is shrinking. The fish are dying. The birds are ailing. And the once-thriving communities along the shore are mostly abandoned. The Salton Sea is an ecological catastrophe just waiting to happen. This photoessay looks at the stark beauty of the place while at the same time documenting some of the effects of environmental decline and devastation.

The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. The award ceremony in Oslo, Norway, brought together heads of state, prominent humanitarians, Hollywood celebrities, rock stars, and journalists from around the world. An all-round extraordinary event. My photoessay captures some of the highlights, from the award ceremony and the torchlight procession through Oslo’s city streets to the globally-televised Nobel Peace Prize Concert hosted by Sharon Stone and Anjelica Houston and featuring artists like John Legend an Lionel Richie.