This series of images was shot at the annual amateur rocket festival and the experimental rocket festival on black rock desert. People from all over the world attend this festival to launch the result of one year’s experimentation with explosives.
One of the amazing things about this festival is the location. In the middle of nowhere in the Nevadan desert on a dry lake bed where there are no roads or houses and where there is no food, suddenly a group of a couple of hundred people appears as out of nowhere, testing out the result of one years experimentation. These rockets go thousand’s of feet up into the air and planes are no longer allowed to fly over black rock desert for the time of this festival.
I was completely fascinated by the dedication of these individuals to their ‘game’. I found out that every single spare penny of income is spent on this ‘hobby’ to the detriment of all other things that might matter in somebody’s life. The strange thing is that what comes out of this effort only lasts a few seconds, yet a whole life ambition is placed into a rocket that goes up slightly straighter, or faster or more spectacular than another rocket. As an artist I found the extreme futility of such an ambition totally fascinating (and there seemed to some kind of parallel here too!)
The other thing that struck me was the way in which the nothingness of this desert becomes a platform for every individual to live out his or her fantasy, however absurd it may be. In these images the desert begins to read like a stage and the individuals like actors that are placed there purely for the purpose of being photographed. I think part of the reason the start to appear like that is because of the absurdity of their actions. It is hard to imagine that something like this would take place in the real world. Furthermore, what is harmless here and practiced with much of the same dedication that somebody might give their model train set, in another context of course represents a real threat. It is this strange relationship, this imitation of a war, that for me creates the tension in those images. When we go to the cinema or the theatre we have to suspend our disbelief to accept what we are seeing as real. Here there is a strange reversal of that; these people have to suspend their belief that what they are shooting up weapons as a game.