Exploring and Photographing the Empty Quarter

A hot pink paraglider sails over the white rooftops of Shibam, a fortified city in eastern Yemen. This strange sight sends the local children stampeding from one end of the city walls to another in an attempt to catch a second glimpse of the unusual visitor. The chaos alerts the local authorities to find the man making this unauthorized tour of their city. Four hundred feet in the air, George Steinmetz continues to photograph Shibam, unaware of the effect his sudden appearance has down below; perched in the seat of his custom-built paraglider, aptly described as a "flying lawn chair," Steinmetz focuses on capturing this region of the Wadi Hadramaut from just the right angle, light, and velocity.

A photo from this flight presents a sweeping image of the centuries-old city springing up from the bed of a desert wadi studded with bushy green palms. The towering landscape of high plateaus in the distance mirrors the city's striking vernacular architecture, traditional five- to nine-story brick buildings that have earned Shibam the title "the Manhattan of the Desert" and a UNESCO World Heritage designation. Two aerial shots of Shibam transform the rectangular rooftops of these narrow, tapering towers into an irregular mosaic of beige and white tiles that fill the frame and elevate the merely picturesque to an artistic abstraction of color, shape, and shadow.

These are the type of shots that Steinmetz, an award-winning photographer and frequent contributor to National Geographic and GEO magazines, is known for: grandiose landscapes of some of the remotest regions of the world; photographs that distort nature's scale and highlight its elemental geometry. His images reveal surprising combinations of the natural and manmade worlds that at times complement one another and at others appear to be at odds.

Unlike most photographers, Steinmetz does much of his photography from the seat of a specially-designed motorized paraglider that allows him to hover at just 500 feet or lower, moving at a single speed, a slow 27 miles per hour. Aloft in the troposphere, Steinmetz is able to capture images unattainable from the ground or other forms of aerial photography, such as striking close-in photos of camels and endangered oryx seen simultaneously from above and in silhouette. It is precisely to capture Arabia's great sand sea from his "experimental aircraft" that he has traveled to one of the world's largest deserts, the Rub al-Khali, or the "Empty Quarter."

Steinmetz's second book, Empty Quarter, presents a collection of photographs taken over the course of his travels in 2002 and 2004 around a territory larger than France, Belgium, and the Netherlands combined, which comprises parts of Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Through a combination of travel narrative, satellite imagery, and photography, Steinmetz addresses the region's perennial issues in an opening essay and topical chapters such as "Oil," "Water," and "Wildlife." With only 32 pages of text in over 250 pages of photographs, many of them stunning scenes of the austere but alluringly beautiful desert, the images are largely allowed to speak for themselves within the context of the chapters.

As his first publication devoted solely to the desert, Empty Quarter stands as a milestone in Steinmetz's project to photograph all the great deserts of the world from the air. In this pursuit he knowingly follows in the footsteps of Bertram Thomas, Harry St. John Philby, and Wilfred Thesiger, the first documented...