Read more about Evans in 'CHARLES EVANS: A PHOTOGRAPHER IN EVOLUTION'

Visit www.digitalpanos.com for more Burning Man panoramas.

Burning Man, the annual arts festival and bacchanal held in the Nevada desert, has reached mythical status, and the uninitiated are curious. We've all heard the allusions: life-changing, soul-inspiring, sudden mind-altering freedom from prohibitive social and class restrictions. But attendees say it's all that, and more.

Burning Man began in 1986, on a beach in San Francisco when a guy named Larry Harvey torched an 8-foot wooden man with 20 of his friends, initiating an annual Labor Day ritual that moved a few years later to the Black Rock desert north or Reno, Nevada, which for one week since has become Black Rock City.

Many things have been said and written about this commerce-free Labor Day event: the freedom from not knowing anyone's clique or creed; the erasure of normal social hierarchies; accomplishments are meaningless, what matters is your body and charm; the drugs make you receptive but the place does the rest; it's the closest imaginable realization of an ideal habitat. But as the Burning Man website so aptly states, trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind.

Many participants -- and in this experiment in temporary community nobody is a spectator -- have been reluctant to discuss the event, cognizant of the inadequacy of words in articulating an event that can only be experienced. VR photographer Charles Evans has generously agreed to talk about the event and share some of his Burning Man VR panoramas with VRMAG readers. Be sure to check out his popular and highly acclaimed website, www.digitalpanos.com, which contains over 60 stunning panoramas of this event alone.

People say that it's hard to describe the feeling the Burning Man event has on people and their psyches. How would you summarize your experiences there?

The Burning Man Festival is definitely one of the most unique events on the planet. By its appearance you might describe the festival as a cross between New Years, Marti Gras, Halloween, the 4th of July, and the Apocalypse all rolled into one. In this respect the festival is an incredible sensory experience. The cumulative amount of effort put into the art installations, costumes, art cars, and theme camps is truly astounding. From a photographer's point of view it's pure heaven. You could shoot 26 hours a day only see a tiny fraction of all the cool stuff out there.

People go to the festival for a lot of different reasons. But the people who go back year after year often tell similar stories about why they like it so much. For one thing Burning Man gives you a chance to live outside the realm of social convention. The festival is held in the Black Rock desert, which is a high-altitude alkali flat in Nevada. This desert is completely and utterly barren. It's basically an immense tabula rasa where people come from all over the world to create a temporary city, a temporary civilization in fact. But the vital difference is that this civilization makes no reference to your ordinary role in life. You "are" whatever you are doing; no explanation is required of you. In this type of environment you are free to reinvent yourself, if only for a brief time, without the demands of ordinary life to hold you back.

This type of situation provides a unique kind of mental therapy. Without the wall of social expectations to push against you realize that the limitations you might feel at any given moment are self-imposed. It's no longer someone else making you feel uncomfortable; it is you making yourself feel uncomfortable. It's rare that we get a chance to test ourselves in this way.

It can take a couple days of being in the desert before you transition into this "other dimension" as I like to think of it. If you're lucky the feeling of living a reinvented life stays with you. The down side of this new-found freedom is the sense of culture shock, sadness, and even depression that you can experience upon returning to the "real world". Because of course by this time you have figured out that it is not real. The "real world" exists somewhere out there in the middle of the desert!

Art is also a core part of the Burning Man experience. For me the Burning Man festival was the first time I really became inspired by art. At Burning Man I see things that make me want to run out and create my own art. I see things that make me want to change some aspect of my life. I see things that make me want to actually go out and do something. This is totally unlike the museum experience. By the time I walk out of a museum I am usually ready to take a nap. I guess you might say the art of Burning Man is "free-range art". It's free to stretch its legs and run around. There is no better place to experience art than out in nature. In nature you can experience something at all times of day, in the rain, sun, wind, from all angles, by yourself, in a crowd, riding by on your bicycle. You can stand there naked at sunrise and see the shadows and light and atmosphere evolving. At Burning Man you can actually interact with the art installations. If you try to touch a piece of artwork in a museum the security guards will jump on you. Contrast this with the experience at Burning Man. At Burning Man next to a piece of art you might see a bucket of wet paint, a paint brush, and a sign that reads "Please do not paint the art." At Burning Man art is not an object art is the infrastructure.

Another interesting aspect of Burning Man is that most of the art is burned sooner or later. This is an important part of the spirit of the festival. People go to tremendous effort, planning, and expense to create and transport art out into the middle of the desert, set it up, and then they just burn it!

Why? For one thing it's fun. But also I think that burning art is an act of purification. It purifies the experience for the participants because you know that the art was not created for some "other" audience. It was not created for a gallery, a museum, or posterity. It was created for you and me in this time and place. The effort made by the artist becomes a personal gift to the people who made the effort to come see it. For the same reason I think that burning art purifies the motives of the artist. If you're only going to burn your art there's no need to compete with other art or artists. There's no motivation to make something pretentious to benefit your ego. And if you are going to burn your art there is certainly no motivation to make it for money!

I've read that the use of cameras is heavily monitored. How did you manage to take these photos?

Well, actually cameras themselves are not restricted. There are about as many cameras at the festival as there are people. The restrictions on photography apply mostly to video and are designed to prevent the commercial exploitation of the festival or participants. You can imagine what MTV would do with the festival. The festival is open to everyone. But the participants attend for their own benefit, not so some cable channel can boost their ratings. So, as a participant you are pretty free to take pictures provided the images are not used in association with any commercial venture. But apart from that, I think the vast majority of Burning Man participants are exhibitionists of one type or another. They love to be seen. They love to make a scene. And they usually don't mind having their pictures taken by other participants.

What problems, if any, did you encounter while photographing the event?

Shooting at sunset was difficult. The sky and ground require much different exposures. If you expose for the sky then the ground gets underexposed. If you expose for the ground then the sky gets over exposed. This is especially true with digital cameras that don't have a very good dynamic range.

At sunset, half the people are backlit and the other half is forelit. Thus, regardless of the sky/ground problem, it is hard to get all the people in the crowd properly exposed.

Another technical problem somewhat unique to "Multi-shot panoramic photography" (i.e. where separate images are combined to create the final panorama) is lens light falloff. Images tend to get darker around the edges than in the middle, which is especially noticeable in side-lit sky images. This causes light and dark bands or zones to become visible in the sky, which should be a perfect, uninterrupted gradient. This is a big down side to the Multi-shot technique.

You have a huge number of panos from the event on your website (around 60 by my count). Can you tell us some of your favorites, and why you're particularly fond of them?

Center Camp Cafe
Center Camp Cafe is a gigantic tent that provides about an acre of shade. It is the central chill-space, meeting grounds, shelter, and coffee house for the entire population of Black Rock City. On any given day it is filled with dusty citizens scattered about in various degrees of consciousness. Center Camp also provides the best people watching on the Playa. Sooner or later everyone passes through center camp. All you have to do is sit, and like a river, the sights and sounds flow past you.

The Man
I guess no discussion of the Burning Man festival would be complete without explaining "The Man". The festival is arranged in a semi-circular pattern. The tent city forms the edges of the circle while all the art installations are placed in the middle. At the center of everything is The Man. The Man is a large wooden effigy illuminated at night by neon. It's basically the mascot and centerpiece of the festival. On the last Saturday of the event 20,000 people or so gather around The Man to burn it. The burning of the Man means something different to everyone but in general it serves the same function as the burning of effigies in old pagan rituals. It marks the end of a season and the beginning of a new year and a new Self. It's time to take account of where you've been and what you want to do. It's also a good excuse to make a giant fire in the middle of the desert!

White Pillars Panorama
One of the most remarkable aspects of displaying art in the middle of the desert is the way the desert changes the meaning of art. Imagine walking across a vast desert plane and coming upon these white pillars. In the context of the completely flat surroundings these pillars form an oasis of vertical. They define a space in an otherwise indefinite landscape. They're like an ancient anonymous artifact. The soft curves of the pillars echo the curvy dark clouds in the background. If displayed in some urban park or corporate courtyard these pillars would attract little attention. But out here in the vast empty desert they take on new meaning.

Piano Panorama
Here's another example of how context changes meaning. A piano by itself doesn't mean much. But a piano sitting in the middle of hundreds of square miles of nothing is something different. And imagine that you come across a piano in the middle of the desert while someone is playing it! To see a solitary human using a complex machine like a piano to make music in the midst of nothingness, with no audience, for no purpose, that is truly a surreal experience. Each element of the scene, in this context, becomes concentrated and makes a lasting impression.

Duck panorama
Here's the same idea but with a little humor. Would you expect to find a giant yellow rubbery ducky in the midst of a desert? The humor is increased when you realize that the Black Rock Desert is in fact an ancient lakebed. This duck has arrived several million years too late to enjoy the water but his size, like some long extinct dinosaur, is in perfect proportion to the vast surroundings. Whatever else the Burning Man festival is, it is to a large extent nothing but a gigantic playground for adults.

Queequeg
This art installation by Peter Anderson illustrates why panoramic photography is such a great advantage at Burning Man. Many of the installations are created to be a "space" rather than object, such as a statue. It's difficult to communicate what such a space feels like if you photograph it from the outside. But with a panorama you get a first-person view. And of course with QuickTime it gets even better. Note: I have no idea who the person in the hammock is. He was passed-out there when I arrived!

Temple panorama
The temple, created by David Best and volunteers, is an elegant two-story structure built from intricate wooden lattice panels. It is resurrected each year in slightly different form. It has, I think, found a special place in the hearts of many participants. First, there is the mind-boggling intricacy of the structure. The over-all pattern is itself composed of smaller patterns, which in turn are composed of yet smaller patterns. It?s kind of like a 3-dimnsional fractal in the middle of the desert. It contrasts wonderfully with the primitive barren surroundings.

Like most art at Burning Man this structure is burned on the last day of the festival. I can honestly say that to stand among thousands of people in the middle of the desert to watch this structure go up in flames is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. It is a poetic experience not easily described. If you look into the crowd while the temple is burning you will see many faces filled with tears. There is just something so intensely aesthetic about the experience you cannot help but feel something. In part I think it's that the structure, which is so delicate and intricate, looks like some sacred shrine; to see it on fire pulls at your instincts to protect it. Yet the sight of it burning, the swirling flames and dancing shadows, is so fascinating you can't help but enjoy it. It's very exciting and the fire creates an incredible amount of heat and light. At a certain point, when the structure is completely engulfed, the excitement changes to a kind of sadness or finality. It's as if this burning temple is a symbol all things. Every beautiful and intricate thing into which people have put so much hard work and planning eventually "burns up" in one way or another.

I think you can see from my pictures that to capture the experience of Burning Man you almost need to do it panoramically. At least, if there is a more satisfying application of panoramic photography than at the Burning Man I haven't found it. A panorama lets you see both the subject and the context. When I show my Burning Man panoramas to people they always say the same things. If they have been to the festival they say, "That's exactly what it's like! I feel like I'm there!" And if they have never been they say, "Wow, I never realized that it's really in the middle of nowhere!" It's great to see close-up shots of people in crazy costumes but one also needs to show the vastness of it all and panoramic photography is a perfect way to do that.

Pyramid panorama
Among my adventures was nearly getting incinerated by an exploding pyramid. I was shooting a panorama of this wooden pyramid when the fireworks inside it exploded. It was the first time I experienced what a war zone must be like. People ran in every direction as fireworks exploded on the ground. I happened to have my back turned when this happened. Next thing I know I'm covered in sparks. I could smell my hair burning. So I grabbed my tripod and ran. It was all quite exciting. And I still have the burn holes in my clothes to prove it! Unfortunately I didn't get to finish the pano so it's only a 180. This type of event is actually pretty common at Burning Man, which is why if you read the back of your Burning Man ticket is says "You voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death by attending."

Visit www.digitalpanos.com for more Burning Man panoramas.
Email: michelle@vrmag.org