Burning Man: Fertility. First time on the playa.
I went to Burning Man for the first time in 1997. Kip drove us out in Amy's RAV4. I brought a headcam, which tells you something about where my head was at — I wanted to document the thing while I was living it.
The theme that year was Fertility. The playa does something to your sense of scale. You drive out into the Black Rock Desert and the sky is enormous and the flatness is absolute and then suddenly there are forty thousand people building a temporary city in the middle of it. The first time you see it, it doesn’t parse correctly. The visual and the conceptual don’t line up.
I came back the next year. And the year after. And the year after that.
By 2026 I would go seventeen times. I don’t have a great explanation for any of it.