MFA Instructor Barbara Traub Featured in TIME for Burning Man Iconic Photography
When TIME Magazine decided to produce a video story on Burning Man – the infamous annual art event and temporary community in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert – it turned to photographer, Barbara Traub.
Barbara has been visually chronicling Burning Man for 15 years, but it was her first shots in 1994 that became the iconic photo on the cover of her book, “Desert to Dream: A Decade of Burning Man Photography.” (By the way, Leonard Nimoy is a contributor!)
“I was looking for a new project to photograph. Having just moved out here, [Burning Man] seemed pretty ideal,” she said. “I remember arriving; it was late in the afternoon…the shadow of the man was stretched out along the playa with just this black speaker box…I was shooting with my Leica Rangefinder and I had one body loaded with color and another with black and white. I shot the same photo that made it on the cover of my book.”
Daughter of a photographer father, Barbara was born and raised in Baltimore and earned a degree in humanities from Johns Hopkins University. She then studied photography for a semester at SACI in Firenze and began her career at a daily newspaper and yearbook company. MFA students enrolled in the Digital Capture class this semester are lucky to have Barbara as their instructor.
If you read through her biography, Barbara has won too many awards to list and her work has been exhibited all over the country. There, she states that her personal work became a “search for the everyday poetic moments.” Her private explorations led her to Burning Man.
“It was a mind blowing. Kind of like parachuting into this whole other realm, this dreamscape. I felt it right away. I had arrived.”
