NEW BOOK
REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION
Written by Jennifer Raiser
Photography by Scott London
Bombay Beach Biennale
A tiny, half-abandoned town in a neglected corner of the California desert seems like an unlikely hotspot for street theater, classical opera and large-scale public art. Yet Bombay Beach on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea has become a thriving outpost of renegade art and free expression. Each spring, the town mounts a weird and wonderful celebration of art, music and ideas. This year I covered the festivities for SFGate: Three Surreal Nights in Bombay Beach, the Strangest Town in California.
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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. In 2023, the lake made a stunning comeback. After one of the wettest winters in more than a century, rain and snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains overwhelmed the levees in the Tulare Basin, inundating an area the size of Lake Tahoe—about 180 square miles.
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Burning Man Diaries
Burning Man 2023 made headlines around the world after torrential rains flooded the Black Rock Desert. The mud created logistical challenges for the tens of thousands gathered at the event, but it was hardly the apocalypse some media outlets made it out to be. If anything, many of us got to experience a different side of Burning Man, one revolving around resilience and community. See my live report from the event in Forbes magazine, or click through to see my images from a uniquely memorable week.
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Summer Solstice
Every summer solstice weekend, 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 when it got its start, yet Solstice remains 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.
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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 photo series of costumed figures set against the backdrop of the Painted Desert. The images were 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.
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Smoke and Mirrors
Smoke and Mirrors is a new photography book exploring 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 writes 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.
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The Ephemeral City
In 2019, Stanford University invited me to speak at its ArtsWest symposium. The event was held at the de Young fine art museum in San Francisco. In my presentation, I reflected on what I’ve learned from a decade and a half of attending Burning Man as a photographer, journalist and cultural observer. My presentation was titled “The Ephemeral City.” Click through to read a transcript of my talk and see a selection of the images that were presented on the big screen.
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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 are creating a twenty-first century corporate culture that celebrates art, creativity and self-expression. The book is out in a French edition, L’usage de l’art, that includes 16 pages of my color photographs along with the cover image.
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A Shoot with Byron Katie
Byron Katie’s influential books and workshops have helped millions of people understand how their lives are shaped—and sometimes misshaped—by the stories they tell about themselves. I discovered her work more than a decade ago and delved deep into her teachings. Given the influence she’s had on me, I was thrilled to be invited to her ranch in the Ojai Valley for a photoshoot. We spent a perfect afternoon together making pictures for the cover of one of her books.