Who better to show us the incredible art at Burning Man than Met friend and professional HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff? This was the third year he attended the week-long annual event held in the scorching hot Nevada desert, which he simply describes as “always different.”
“It’s the only place in the world you can go where things are always different but always awesome,” he says.
Though you may already know Ratcliff’s through his incredible photos, you may not be aware of his “bromance” with the former President of MySpace Tom Anderson. After learning about it on PetaPixel’s recent interview with Anderson we asked Ratcliff to tell us how the friendship started. “We both met on Google+ since we were somehow in the Top 10 most followed together,” he says. “I liked his thinking and analytical posts, and he liked my photography. One week when I went to LA, he offered me his second house in Hollywood to stay in, which was rather nice of him! We ended up meeting on the final evening for Thai food, and we sat outside the restaurant for 12 hours talking till 6 AM. After that, we started traveling the world together while he explored his photo-curious side.”
Throughout this three years at Burning Man, Ratcliff has taken some spectacular shots of the artwork there. When asked what it was like experiencing it first-hand, he frankly said, “Look, I’m not a fan of ‘modern’ art, or anything that is pretentious or requires some redonkulous explanation by some annoying graduate student. I was afraid I’d see a ton of that, but I did not. There is so much interesting ‘stuff’ there, and while some is clearly ‘art’ other stuff falls between into something interesting and undefinable. For example, what do you call 1,000 people dressed up in crazy bunny costumes jumping across the desert together? I don’t know! But it’s very interesting and an amazing place for photography.”
While you can see all of Ratcliff’s Burning Man photos here, we’ve put together some of our favorites in this post.
“Here is one of my favorite new photos from Burning Man,” he wrote back in 2011. “I took a photo of this full statue last year, and it was one of my favorites. This year, only the torso remained, and it looked like it sank into the desert a bit. People climbed all over it, day and night.
“Who would have thought that thousands of artists can come together in the desert every summer to unleash their creations on the world? This is yet another reason to sleep during the hot day… so you can go out and spend most of the night walking around and explore these sorts of beauties.”
