Burning Man 2008: A Photo Essay by Matt Freedman

Burning Man is not only the world’s most unique and visually spectacular cultural event, but the nexus for a worldwide community that exists all year long. It is a temporary city of 50,000 people which leaves absolutely no trace when it is gone. It is about radical self-reliance in a harsh but incredibly beautiful desert environment, and radical self-expression in a gift-based economy.

Think of Burning Man 2008: A Photo Essay by Matt Freedman as the first coffee table book for the iPhone. It contains over 300 extraordinary Burning Man photos, packaged in an easy-to-use full screen photo viewer, along with several valuable essays, including my 4,000 word Photography at Burning Man how-to guide, which gives you detailed information on how to take better photographs at the event. What gear to bring, how to carry and protect it, when and where to shoot what, and perhaps most importantly, rules and etiquette.

This app is a labor of love – as an attendee for over a decade, Burning Man is my artistic muse. It is the place where I really discovered my love of photography, and realized that it was my calling in life. I shot over 2500 images at Burning Man in 2008, selected the very best ones, painstakingly optimized each one them to turn it into a unique piece of 320×480 pixel fine art, wrote thousands of words of text content, taught myself the iPhone development environment, wrote the app myself, and perhaps the most challenging part – survived the Apple app submission process (after 23 days and two separate completely ridiculous rejections for “inappropriate content”)

I believe that this app is the first attempt to use the iPhone as a platform to sell a serious fine art photography book (though with 50,000 apps in the store, who knows what the hell is in there). There are of course many other e-book platforms, but none of them that I have seen are optimized for photography like mine is.

I have basically re-created the built-in Photos application with a few key extensions (i.e. optional display of captions, user-selectable Favorites album, and “black barring” of images that do not exactly fit the screen rather than zooming and cropping them), and bundled it with it a text essay reader. The app is of course written as a platform, not just a one-off, so there will be many more iPhone coffee table books to come, from a variety of top-notch photographers.