The cracked, grey playa of America's Black Rock Desert stretches for kilometres in every direction. The dead, ancient lake bed is a stark place; scorching hot during the day and cold at night. But for a week each year, this flat, barren landscape is filled with exuberance and alive with humanity. All manner of vehicles descend on this part of northwestern Nevada in a riot of colour and noise to celebrate life in a 'temporary community'. This is Burning Man, a festival known for radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.
Burning Man, which this year takes place in the first week of next month, is designed to be a participatory gathering. Unlike other festivals, everyone is encouraged to express their creativity. For example, Red, a free-form musician from Palo Alto, California, exhibited her talents by playing her tuba while riding a unicycle up and down the playa. Other Black Rock participants celebrate their individuality with wild performance art, walking poetry, song, drumming, theatre, dance, painting, sculpting and even fire eating.
Alongside dedicated artists, an army of carpenters, mechanics and metalsmiths team up to haul and build huge art installations out in the desert. Residents of this temporary city put tremendous effort into designing, transporting and building their artworks and theme camps on the playa. This year's Burning Man art theme is 'Metropolis'.
The event takes place near the small town of Gerlach, just off Highway 447. Despite being in the middle of nowhere, thousands of pilgrims return to the desert for Burning Man year after year. The central anchor for the event, a 15-metre-tall wooden man, is erected before theme camps and art installations begin to jut out in ever-widening concentric circles around it. At the end of the week-long festivities, the man is set alight.
Burning Man began in 1986 as a small, improvised event of only 20 people at Baker Beach in San Francisco. Co-founder Larry Harvey designed the first man, then burned it down in honour of the summer solstice. It has since evolved into a major annual gathering and is expected to attract 40,000 participants this year.
The non-commercial festival brings together a uniquely unpredictable combination of art, energy, mardi gras, fashion show, Halloween, road warrior, light show, grunge, nudity and retro clothing in a boundless, surreal landscape. The mix of imagination, crazy fun and physical challenge is luring more people every year.
'At Burning Man, everyone's personal space is relaxed, you can walk right up to anyone, at any time and it's OK,' says Richard Woodsen from Phoenix, Arizona.