Latest News & Updates
Burning Man Diaries
Burning Man 2023 made headlines around the world after torrential rains flooded the Black Rock Desert. The mud created some logistical challenges but most of the news accounts painted a false picture, saying people were marooned in the desert without food and supplies. Some reports, including a few about Ebola and e. coli outbreaks were, if not ridiculous, wildly exaggerated. I’ll have photos to share very soon. Meanwhile, check out my commentary and images in Forbes magazine, link below.
Burning Man: Art on Fire
Burning Man: Art on Fire is billed as a collection of the best of Burning Man art and photography featuring amazing stories and interviews from “the world’s greatest celebration of artistic expression.” The book is a collaboration with writer Jennifer Raiser and includes a foreword by Burning Man’s CEO Marian Goodell, a preface by writer Will Chase and an afterword by artist Leo Villareal. It features some 230 of my photographs spanning nearly two decades. The book came out in early July.
Tulare: The Phantom Lake
Tulare Lake was once the largest body of fresh water in the American West, a vast inland sea in California’s Central Valley. But after its tributaries were dammed and diverted a century ago, the lake dried up and the land was reclaimed for agriculture. This year the lake has made a startling comeback. After one of the wettest winters in more than a century, rain and snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains have overwhelmed the levees in the Tulare Basin, inundating an area the size of Lake Tahoe—about 180 square miles.
Summer Solstice
Every year on the weekend of the summer solstice, Santa Barbara is taken over by carnivalesque floats, Brazilian drummers, stilt walkers, performance artists, kids in costume, and samba dancers wearing feathers and sequins (and not much else). It’s not the edgy and raucous event it used to be back in the 1970s. But Solstice still represents one of southern California’s best street parties. After a decade and a half of covering the event, I’m convinced there’s no better place to celebrate the longest days of the year.
Bombay Beach Biennale
Artists have taken over Bombay Beach, a mostly abandoned town on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea, turning it into a canvas for visionary art and free expression. Each spring the place is transformed into an immersive art venue — but there are no tickets sold and attendence is capped at just a few hundred. The renegade art festival has generated buzz throughout the art world. The Guardian describes it as “a bohemian dream” and the New York Times calls it “a pageantry of art and opera and weirdness.” This year’s event just wrapped up.
Smoke and Mirrors
Smoke and Mirrors, a new photography book published by Hoxton Mini Press and Penguin Books, explores the connection between the car and the camera through the lens of two dozen photographers. One of the chapters showcases my “Mutant Vehicles” series, featuring a selection of images from the project along with an incisive write-up by journalist Adam Hay-Nicholls. As he says in the introduction, “the images in this book, by some of the world’s best photographers, show cars at their most wild, playful and inventive.” The book is out now.
Painted Desert
The Painted Desert series grew out of a conceptual art project combining photography, costume design and immersive theater. Working with the Phoenix-based Vessel Project, I created a series of photographs of costumed figures set against the backdrop of Arizona’s otherworldly Painted Desert. The images were then presented as part of an interactive performance piece at several venues throughout Arizona, including the Spark Festival in Mesa, the Public Art Program in Glendale, and the Phoenix Art Museum.
The Art of Silicon Valley
My work is featured in a new book by Fred Turner, a professor at Stanford University who writes about media, technology and American cultural history. Fred’s book explores how how Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies have created a new kind of corporate culture that emphasizes the power of art, creativity and self-expression. The book is out in a French edition, L’usage de l’art, that includes a 16-page section of my color photos (along with an image of mine on the cover). It was a great project and a joy to work with Fred.
Mutant Vehicles: The Book
If you’re wondering about a mysterious photography book under my name called Mutant Vehicles — listed on Amazon and elsewhere — the project was an unfortunate casualty of the pandemic. In 2019, I was approached by Hoxton Mini Press about creating a photography book on art cars. We put a lot of work into developing a concept, selecting photographs, creating initial layouts, gathering permissions, and notifying booksellers about the forthcoming release. But a few months in, the outbreak of the coronavirus forced us to shelve the project.
The Ephemeral City
In February 2019, Stanford University invited me to speak at the ArtsWest symposium, “Burning Man: Art and Technology.” The event was held at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. In my presentation, I showed over one hundred photos and reflected on what I’ve learned from a decade and a half of attending Burning Man as a photographer, journalist and cultural observer. Click through for the complete text of the talk — titled “The Ephemeral City” — as well as a handful of the images that were presented on the big screen.
A Shoot with Byron Katie
Byron Katie’s books and workshops have helped tens of thousands of people understand how their lives are shaped—and often misshaped—by the stories they tell about themselves. I discovered her work more than a decade ago and it opened up a new world of insight and understanding. Given the influence Katie has had on me, I was thrilled to be asked to photograph her at her ranch house in Ojai, California. We spent an enchanting afternoon shooting a cover for one of her books.
Oregon Eclipse
In August 2017, tens of thousands of people from around the world converged in central Oregon to witness the total eclipse of the sun. The immense gathering was the culmination of a weeklong celebration of art, music, and ideas — a coming together of artists, visionaries and social innovators to collaborate and inspire. The event gave new meaning to the phrase “transformational festival” and hearkened back to the Summer of Love exactly 50 years earlier. I spent five days covering the event.
Copyright 2023 by Scott London. All rights reserved.