Barbara Traub is Barbed and Wired with special musical guests Supertasty (Tom Morgan & Paul Bonanos) photo by Barbara Traub

Barbara Traub is a San Francisco Photographer Who Specializes in the Surreal. --Micropublishing News

July's featured Tentacle Session artist was San Francisco photographer Barbara Traub.

Barb had hand-picked a selection of her photos taken from all over the world, spanning more than a decade to share with the Session audience. But there was a lot more--readings, music, the latest in experimental interviewing techniques, anecdotes, and surprising surprises abounded. This show was presented at the Blasthaus Gallery space on Barneveld off of Bayshore.

Born in Baltimore, MD, Barbara Traub attended Johns Hopkins University and received a degree in Humanities. It was time spent in Florence, Italy that coincided with her first serious work as a photographer. Since then she has traveled and shown her work widely--from Lithuania to Belgium to Bombay to Paris to Odense, Denmark. In the states her work has graced the walls of galleries in Baltimore, New York, & LA. In the Bay Area she has shown most recently this Spring at the Rizzoli Gallery, as well as at Scott Nichols, 111 Minna, ADD Magnum, and in Palo Alto at the Xerox PARC Research Center.

Barbara moved to San Francisco in the early 90's and attended the Burning Man festival in 1994. Her Burning Man photographs were featured in the Wired Magazine article written by Bruce Sterling in 1996, and she was the primary photographer for the HardWired "Burning Man" book the next year.

Her influences as a photographer include Man Ray , Ralph Gibson, Robert Frank especially his book "The Americans". More generally she has taken inspiration from the Surrealist Movement and its "reuniting [of] conscious and unconscious realms of experience".

For the Tentacle Sessions, Barbara put her images on the screen, put words to her images, and told her own story from Baltimore to Burning Man and beyond. There was music provided by fellow Baltimore natives Tom Morgan (of "Sexpot" fame) & Paul Bonanos who performed together as Supertasty.