Burning Man 1990-2011 - A Video Retrospective Series

Burning Man 1990. Source: Danger Ranger

BURNcast was delighted on how our collection of Burning Man tickets from 1995-2011 was shared with a wide audience of burners thanks in no small part to LaughingSquid deeming it worth a blog post.

It got us to thinking it also might be worthwhile to curate videos from each year of Burning Man as well so over the next posts leading up to this year's burn. So we're going to do just that: post a series of videos about Burning Man from 1990 to current day.

After culling the Internetz for footage we discovered that some of the earliest videos coming out from the event were dated 1994. But we found this gem produced by the Bay Area Video Coalition that features footage from one of the earliest beach burns as well as the first burn ever to take place on the playa.

Of this video, BVAC writes:

Jerry James, Larry Harvey, John Law
Burning Man 1990 Source: Kevin Evans

The Burning Man of today evolved originally from an annual art party hosted by Mary Grauberger. Taking place on or around the summer solstice on San Francisco's Baker Beach prior to 1986, the art parties had sculpture burning as a central theme. Then in 1986 Larry Harvey, inspired in part by Mary Grauberger's events, asked his friend Jerry James to help him build an 8' effigy to be burned on Baker beach. This event, unnamed at this point, continued annually until 1990 when, the effigy having grown to 40', the police pulled the plug on the parties climactic burn. Meanwhile, Kevin Evans and John Law, of the Cacophony Society, were planning a similar event called Zone Trip #4 - A Bad Day at Black Rock in Nevada's Black Rock Dessert. Harvey and friends, having nowhere to burn the 40' effigy, joined forces with the Zone Trip #4 group and this was the birth of what we now know as Burning Man.