Dating back to 1986, Burning Man was originally inspired by a few friends — Larry Harvey and Jerry James — building and burning a human effigy on a beach in San Francisco. Witnessing the crowd that formed, and experiencing the bonding, almost tribal experience of people sharing a then unclear ritual, Burning Man was born.
Over the next few years, Harvey and a growing group of folks expanded the scope of the ritual — and the size of “the man,” until in 1990, the event was moved to Black Rock Desert, in rural Nevada. There, participants and organizers alike would collaborate to form a sort of temporary, dadaist, autonomous zone; a temporary city, built for just one week, with it’s own economic, cultural, and political systems. Judgement, money, and inhibitions were left at the gate in an earth-shattering sociocultural experiment with no clear destination nor agenda. And, true to the original “burn,” art structures including the effigy would be burned to signal the end of the gathering.
Fast forward to today, and Burning Man has turned into a whole new beast. With your average person needing to shell out $1500 over the course of the festival, ‘escaping capitalism’ in order to rub shoulders with spaced out Silicon Valley brogrammers and pseudo-bohemian billionaires doesn’t come cheap.
Of course, there is still a large core of regulars and those who attend in the true spirit of the event, the installations are pretty amazing and the atmosphere is as intense as ever. Those that we mostly see however are the same old Instagram influencers, whose habit of taking similarly posed photos can make even an event like Burning Man seem like we’ve seen it all before.
Luckily, we have managed to find a number of awesome pics from this years event. Scroll down below to check them out for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments!
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