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SANTA BARBARA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 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. The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The award ceremony in Oslo, Norway, brought together heads of state, prominent humanitarians, Hollywood celebrities, rock stars, and journalists from around the world. This photoessay captures some of the highlights in words and images. 2007 marked the 21st anniversary of the Burning Man festival and over the course of two decades the event has grown to become one of the world's hippest and most mind-blowing gatherings. Not quite an art festival, not quite a desert rave, not quite a social experiment, but something of all three, Burning Man is a week-long celebration of free-form creativity and radical self-expression held each summer in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. It's a place of uncommon natural beauty, an inland oasis surrounded by barren and 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. This photoessay captures the stark beauty of the place while at the same time documenting the effects of environmental decline and devastation. |