‘Chuck & Rex, Desert Blast, Nevada, 1999’
Hahnemühle Pearl Giclée paper, 16×12 inches
Edition of 75
I’m releasing this print from one of my earliest and craziest series ‘Desert Blast’, which was an annual invitation-only pyrotechnic festival held at one of the many dry lakebeds outside Las Vegas, Nevada.
Desert Blast was started in 1986 by Bob Lazar, a former government physicist who claims he worked on alien spacecraft at Area 51. The exact date and location of “DB” was kept secret each year to avoid a deluge of spectators and apparently law enforcement! After many months of negotiating, I managed to get access, the first ‘outsider’ to do so, producing an exclusive set of photographs documenting this surreal pyro-party.
This is the first time I’ve released this image and it will be available to buy until July 24th (unless it sells out before) – so be quick to avoid disappointment!
The print comes either framed or unframed and with a digitally signed & numbered certificate of authenticity. It will be shipped 2-3 weeks after the sale closes.
I will be giving away a signed contact sheet featuring the photograph to one lucky purchaser of the print (see above).
BUY HERE: https://simoncroberts.myshopify.com/pages/desert-blast
Image: ‘Desert Blast #12, Large Glitter Maroon Flash, Nevada, 1999’
I have prints from my This Lands is Your Land series included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography exhibition Go Down Moses.
The exhibition is guest curated by Teju Cole. An acclaimed writer, photographer, and critic, Cole is the former photography critic of the New York Times Magazine and is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University. This is his first major curatorial project.
Go Down Moses presents a reinterpretation of the MoCP’s permanent collection that can be understood as a visual tone poem of contemporary America, exploring elemental themes of movement, chaos, freedom, and hope. In doing so, Cole uses the photographic archive to interweave the past and present, suggesting an aesthetic approach to understanding the current psyche. He writes:
Questions of liberation tend to interleave the present and the past. What is happening now is instinctively assessed with the help of what happened before, and both despair and hope are tutored by memory. The old Negro spiritual “Go Down Moses,” beloved by Harriet Tubman and generations since, sought to link the black American freedom quest with the story of ancient Israel’s struggle to be free of Pharaoh’s bondage.
Humanity is on the move. The ground beneath our feet is shifting, the skies cannot be relied upon, and even our own bodies bear the marks of the strain. Everyone is longing to be free, and everyone is curious about whether hope is still possible. The photographic archive contains evidence that thus it ever was, that we have always lived in this urgency.Through an intuitive sequence of photographs, in images soft and loud, this exhibition proposes a redefinition: that hope has nothing to do with mood or objective facts, but is rather a form of hospitality offered by those who are tired to those who are exhausted.
You can read an article on the exhibition in the Guardian here.
A photograph from my series This Land is Your Land, features on the cover of a new edition of Albert Camus’ book The Rebel.
It is one of several new editions of Camus’ books released by Penguin. You can see more here.
Following the publication of two Albert Camus essays in August, the author’s works are republished by Penguin this month with new covers by a range of photographers such as Rankin and Simon Roberts. Again, the design concept is concerned with changing the perception of Camus’ philosophical writing…
The Outsider features a cover photograph by Rankin, while Caligula and Other Plays uses an image taken by Joel Meyerowitz. Many of the photographs used on the new editions depict coastal locations bathed in sunshine, though some retain a sense of the foreboding, such as the cover of A Happy Death, for example – a close-cropped shot of a sunbather.
The new-look series was originally proposed by publisher Alexis Kirschbaum, while the images for the covers themselves were sourced by picture editor, Samantha Johnson. In August, the publication of The Sea Close By marked the beginning of the Camus relaunch (it is also the centenary year of the author) and introduced a discernably sunnier side to his novels, stories and plays.
“Image-wise we were keen to try something new and avoid the many visual clichés that are often associated with Camus,” says Penguin art director, Jim Stoddart. “These covers offer a new kind of iconography – we’re aiming to change the perception of Camus from a cold existentialist into an aesthetic sensualist.”
The new editions of Camus’ works are published on October 31 by Penguin Modern Classics.
Pyro Boy in action at Winter Blast, Arizona, 2008.
Pyro Boy, Desert Blast, Nevada, 1999 © Simon Roberts, from the series ‘This Land is Your Land‘