George Steinmetz

Flying hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet above ground strapped into a motorized paraglider that is little more than a parachute with a small motor, National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz has spent more than twenty years photographing some of the most remote and spectacular environments around the world. In African Air, Steinmetz captures stunning panoramas in more than fourteen countries in Africa, giving readers captivating and intimate views of areas that have rarely, if ever before, been photographed. From densely packed urban centers to small, remote villages, from migrating herds of wildebeests and elephants to infinite miles of desert, African Air is a compelling testament and celebration of the majesty and splendor of Africa’s most breathtaking landscapes. With extraordinary vision and a unique perspective, Steinmetz portrays sky, land, and water in ways that have never been expressed before.

Celebrated exploration photographer George Steinmetz takes his art to a new level in Desert Air, the first comprehensive photographic collection of the world’s “extreme deserts,” which receive less than four inches of precipitation per year. Steinmetz has spent 15 years on this epic body of work, capturing remarkable and surreally beautiful visions of deserts, from China’s great Gobi Desert to the Sahara in northern Africa to Death Valley in California. Much more than a visual journey, these images are enriched by the exciting stories behind Steinmetz’s adventures in some of the world’s most difficult and challenging areas—from smuggling his paraglider into Libya to getting arrested for spying in Iran, to crashing into a tree in western China. Desert Air reveals extraordinary desert ecosystems that together form a kind of disparate family of coevolved landscapes; similar, yet each unique in its own way.