“Abdu, you’ve got to fire this motherfucker.”
“George, I cannot. It is not possible, George.”
At a café on the main road of Djanet, a scraggly frontier town in southeastern Algeria, a spread of lentil stew and strawberry soda was gathering flies. George Steinmetz, a freelance photographer, and Abdarahman Daoudi, a translator and fixer, were thirty-four days into a six-week trip that had taken them and a caravan of Toyota Land Cruisers, stuffed with tarps, blankets, bananas, drums of water, jerricans of gasoline, guides, drivers, a cook—it was, by then, an eight-man expedition—on a snaky north-south route from Béjaïa, through the palm groves of El Oued and the casbah of Ghardaïa, the rippling ergs of Timimoun and the forêts de pierre of the Hoggar Mountains, to Djanet, an hour’s drive from the border with Libya. They were doing seventy-five hundred miles a week, and tensions, as they do in the company of maps and men, had arisen. Most pressingly, Steinmetz was convinced that one of their party—Jafar, a kindly and cataracted ancient they had picked up in Tamanrasset, who was serving as the group’s navigator—was going to get them all killed.
“This guy, he’s a disaster,” Steinmetz said. “He can’t find his ass with his own two hands.” Steinmetz had already lost several days of work to Jafar’s miscalculations. Had the convoy followed his directions en route to Djanet, Steinmetz said, hundreds of miles into the Sahara, in the middle of a desolate sand sea, they would have run out of fuel.
To lead the trip, Daoudi, a hale, smiling twenty-seven-year-old, had taken a leave from his job as an electrical engineer with the state power utility. Despite the long days and short tempers, he had come to adore Steinmetz, whose requests he usually greeted with sympathy and resourcefulness. Now he looked as though he might retch.
“George, I tell you it is not possible,” he said. “Jafar has a family he must support.” The crew—young, unmarried Tuareg men—was comforted, Daoudi said, by Jafar’s presence. He made the fires. He made the tea.
“I don’t need a teaboy!” Steinmetz yelled. “He’s dead weight. This is not a socialist bureaucracy!”
Steinmetz, who is fifty-two, looks much as he did in 1979, when, after dropping out of Stanford, he spent twenty-eight months hitchhiking across Africa—a preppy vagabond with a camera, a stove, and a snakebite kit. He still travels light. In Djanet, he was dressed in a red moisture-wicking turtleneck (one of three shirts he’d brought), blanched Levi’s, and a pair of mutilated Top-Siders. (“In a rush, I packed my garden shoes.”) Frequently, he wore a personalized baseball cap that read “Ain’t No 911.” He is tall and lean, a campfire smoker and a speed-eater, with shy eyes and a winter tan. His hands are cracked like elephant skin. He wears a fraying friendship bracelet. His face bears a scar from western China, where, in 2007, he crashed into a tree. When he woke up, in the dirt, several teeth were poking through his cheek.
A free spirit with a G.P.S., Steinmetz pursues the aims of Jack Kerouac by the means of Frank Gilbreth. In the name of efficiency, he will set the table with the forks on the right; still, he is susceptible to mid-meal demonstrations of dinner-plate tectonics. He has little interest in niceties—the forks soon give way to fingers—but he is a patient explainer, and a whiz at diagrammatic metaphor. The town of Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife, Lisa Bannon, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, and their three children, is laid out “like a fish skeleton”; wind-eroded rock pillars in the Tassili n’Ajjer resemble “a bed of nails.” He is fond of goofy abbreviations—T.M.I., O.P.M., T.I.A. (“This is Africa”). The argot of the expedition was Franglish—“The motor, it seemed to be working parfait,” “Hotel Quelque Chose”—leavened with a bit of Arabic. The crew was amused to no end by Steinmetz’s single-mindedness in the field, his goads to “Yalla, yalla!” Because, they said, he was interested in only two things—working and taking pictures—they had started calling him, among themselves, George le japonais.
Steinmetz takes the majority of his pictures from a custom-built contraption that he refers to as a flying lawn chair. In 2008, Abrams published “African Air,” featuring his work from nineteen countries over twenty-six years. Last year, he released “Empty Quarter,” a survey of the unforgiving and largely untrodden wildernesses of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Between assignments for National Geographic, Smithsonian, and the German magazine GEO, Steinmetz has for the past fifteen years been gathering material for a book on deserts, which, with their unfathomable expanses and geometric landforms, are particularly suited to the sort of tessellated, sweeping shots that he is known for, and that his machine enables. He had checked the disassembled flying machine from Newark to Béjaïa in three huge duffelbags. He can fly it as low as a hundred feet, in relative quiet. His perspective, unobstructed by glass or struts, is as close as a human can come to the bird’s eye.
In 2003, Steinmetz travelled to Iran—the first person since the revolution, he thinks, to be granted permission to take photographs there from a private aircraft. He was detained three times. His guides took to playing the theme from “Mission: Impossible” on the car stereo. To capture opening night at La Scala for an early assignment, he hid a camera in his tux. (He also met Bannon, from whom he rented a room in Milan.) In South Dakota, he drank Lysol and Aqua Net with the subjects of a story about alcoholism. (“Go with Lysol.”) Steinmetz learned to fly in 1997, after a bush pilot bailed out on a trip to Niger. He scorns hotdogging for its own sake—“I’m a photographer who flies, not a pilot who takes pictures”—but he will take his chances, or his advantage, when the task demands it. In Israel, where a friend knew a radar operator, he managed to buzz a men-only nude beach. In the resulting photographs, amid the scrum of tiny sunbathers, one can make out a tube sock being used as a peculiar form of sunscreen.
We were stuck in Djanet, where I joined Steinmetz in mid-December, waiting for one of the Land Cruisers to be repaired. Cement-block shops lined the main road. Garlands of pennants depicting the Algerian flag and the visage of the Algerian President, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, fluttered between lampposts. The women in sight were mostly on the way to market. Men wore two-piece, pajama-like cotton robes, in an array of colors: lavender, indigo, a pale green that resembled hospital scrubs. The typical cheche, or veil, usually white, shrouded all but the men’s eyes, which were often themselves shaded by blade-style sunglasses. Vertebral clouds spined a bright-blue sky, offsetting sandstone bluffs the color of cane sugar.
A few days earlier, Steinmetz, trying to elude the gendarmes after an illicit sunset flight over a remote oasis, had made an off-road getaway. This was done without the benefit of headlights. His car had ended up suspended in the air at a forty-five-degree angle, nose in the sand. Its back wheels rested on the face of a small cliff. After much digging and more talking—car repair is to Djanet what real estate is to New York City—it had been concluded that the car’s frame was shot. Meeting me at the airport, Steinmetz had stuck out his hand and said, “We’ve been running from little green men.”
At the café, Daoudi’s cell phone erupted with the sound of “Tamiditin,” a popular Tamashek-language love song. It was Fuad, the boss back at the tourist agency in Tamanrasset, to whom Daoudi had appealed to resolve the personnel stalemate. Daoudi passed the phone to Steinmetz.
“You can pick up another guide, but you can’t fire Jafar,” Fuad said. “The whole crew has threatened to quit if you do.”
Steinmetz listened and handed the phone back to Daoudi, who ended the call.
“O.K., but he’s baggage,” Steinmetz said. “He’s the teaboy—that’s it!”
The flying lawn chair is actually a motorized paraglider—a sail, a tank of gas, a propeller, and a seat. Steinmetz is the fuselage. He never flies for fun, but the apparatus has a back-yardish feel: picture a man with a leaf blower on his back, encircled by a metal hula hoop, dangling at altitudes of up to six thousand feet under a tomato-colored beach umbrella. The sail—paragliders call it a “wing,” because it’s cambered, like a bird’s—is connected from its trailing edge to hand controls by two sets of nylon-sheathed brake lines in fluorescent colors. (They look like Silly String.) Steinmetz uses the brake lines, which work the wing like flaps on an airplane, to steer. The machine is more sophisticated, and more reliable, than Le Géant, the dirigible that the photographer Félix Nadar built in 1863—Daumier depicted him in a lithograph entitled “Nadar élevant la Photographie à la hauteur de l’Art”—but it is similar in its spirit. It conjures a patrimony of buoyant wondrousness, of whirligigs, rockets, boomerangs, blimps, and helium balloons, as though Leonardo da Vinci had collaborated on its design with Carl Fredricksen, the hero of the movie “Up.”
Paragliders, the lightest of powered aircraft, occupy a murky regulatory zone. You do not need a pilot’s license to fly one in the United States; in many places, you probably ought to have some sort of authorization. According to the United States Powered Paragliding Association, motorized paragliding is safer than riding a motorcycle but more dangerous than driving a car. In any case, it’s a lot of trouble—why not just go up in a plane? There is the expense, and what Steinmetz calls “the hassle factor”—permits, takeoff slots. More important, Steinmetz believes that he is able to get superior pictures flying in open air. The paraglider, on the back of a camel or in the hull of a dugout canoe, can go places that planes, which require airports, cannot. It is highly maneuverable, whereas trying to get a pilot to put a plane exactly where you want it is like trying to get someone else to scratch an itch. “With the glider, it’s very plastic,” Steinmetz said. “It’s like Silly Putty. You can warp your position in space.” David Griffin, the director of photography at National Geographic, told me, “Photographers are always trying to find a unique perspective, and George gets himself an angle of view that basically nobody else can do.”
From the glider, Steinmetz commands hundred-and-eighty-degree vertical and horizontal views. Because he flies low (“It’s really only interesting once you get down to five hundred feet”) and slow (the paraglider has one speed, twenty-seven miles per hour), he is able to get close enough to a landscape to engage it. Cruising above a field of fairy circles in Namibia a few years ago, he spotted some grazing zebra. “I was able to herd them where I wanted them to be, like it was a rodeo,” he recalled.
Not everyone approves of this approach—a reader complained to Smithsonian of a “disturbing picture” of “tens of thousands of Cape Fur Seals in Namibia being stampeded as a result of an overflight by a thoughtless George Steinmetz”—but it endows his pictures with unusual intimacy. A flock of flamingos that Steinmetz shot on Bolivia’s Altiplano plateau would have been wads of bubble gum from a plane. Humans seem to find the unexpected sight of him more whimsical than threatening. In Kenya, he drifted over a primary school; the resulting picture shows hundreds of girls in pink polo shirts, royal-blue sweaters, and grass-green full-length skirts, their heads tilted up toward Steinmetz, an airborne ice-cream man.
Taking aerial photographs is, in a way, like metal detecting—a hunt for treasure invisible from the earth’s surface—but it is also akin to grocery shopping, in that it involves a lot of checking things off lists. While he was in Algeria, Steinmetz wanted to shoot Sefar, an isolated portion of the Tassili plateau, separated from Djanet by about seven miles and a wall of two-thousand-foot-high cliffs. To get to Sefar and back was a five-day journey by donkey. Steinmetz didn’t want to gamble a week on one shot, so he and François Lagarde, a Paris doctor and paragliding enthusiast who often travels with him, had concocted a plan. Taking off from an oued—a dry riverbed—outside town, Steinmetz would attempt to clear the cliffs in the flying machine. A local guide had set out in advance with donkeys and supplies, in case Steinmetz ran out of gas, or wind, and couldn’t make it back.
“I’ll fly along the donkey path for safety,” Steinmetz explained, the night before the flight, sitting in the flickering dim of Djanet’s Internet center. He pulled up a Google Earth map on his laptop, a battered Mac. The map was studded with yellow thumbtacks, each one marked with coördinates. (Before Google Earth, Steinmetz had to cold-call scientists and beg for satellite pictures.) Steinmetz would follow the path, a sort of trail of bread crumbs, with a handheld G.P.S. He flies at dawn and at dusk, when wind conditions tend to be relatively stable and the light is best.
“To me, it looks like a burned-out Manhattan,” Steinmetz said, homing in on Sefar. Dark blocks of sandstone, tapering into whorls and spindles, reminded me of a Tetris game, or Hebrew letters. As he zoomed out, the landscape became a palimpsest, half-eroded slot canyons baring chutes of yellowed sand. “If you had to put down in there, you’d get really messed up,” Steinmetz said. “It’s like landing in a cheese grater.”
The morning of the Sefar flight arrived cold and clear. “Bright stars,” Steinmetz said, as we trundled to the cars in the darkness.
We raced out of town on empty roads. After about ten minutes, we reached a turnoff. Soon, we were slaloming across a series of rutted pistes, taking the curves fast and tight, as though the cars were on skis. Daoudi, driving, swung a sudden doughnut. “Don’t chase the fennec, Abdu!” Steinmetz said, as a furry animal scampered into the brush.
The afternoon before, Steinmetz had scouted the area. To take off and to land, he needs a clear space about the size of a basketball court. (This rules out big cities, dense forests, and large bodies of water, though he has flown over smaller ones, trailed by a rescue skiff.) Air conditions are crucial: there must be enough wind to inflate the wing, but not so much as to overpower Steinmetz’s ability to steer. Trying to fly the paraglider in high wind is like being tied to a spinnaker in a gale. At the takeoff site, a shallow canyon facing a low rocky shoulder, gusts whipped a few spindly acacias. Jafar, in a coarse brown burnous, had had to start his fire in a ditch.
The crew got to work readying Steinmetz’s machine, which stood upright on a rubber mat. Daoudi filled the gas tank. Someone taped a bottle of carrot juice—emergency provisions—to the cage. Steinmetz, wearing a red-and-black flight suit and kneepads, an altimeter strapped to his left thigh, kicked rocks from the takeoff strip. Nearby, Daoudi and Lagarde unfurled the wing.
At six-forty, Steinmetz cranked up the machine. It was not in pristine shape. The previous day, he’d failed to take off in five tries. The cage had bent in two places, and a line had got snarled in the prop. Fixing the machine is an improvisational enterprise. Lagarde—I thought of him as François le français, paring apples with a penknife and likening aborted flights to failed love affairs—had jury-rigged the line by piecing in some scraps. For the cage, he fashioned a sort of splint. On Steinmetz’s last attempt, the propeller had snapped in half. I’d gathered up the jagged shards, like firewood. Steinmetz had replaced it with a spare.
Daoudi and Steinmetz carried the machine over toward the wing, which was billowing violently.
“It’s too windy,” Steinmetz said. “We have to move.”
To save time, the crew stuffed the intact machine in the back of the flight car. Lagarde rode on the roof.
Twenty minutes later, Steinmetz was setting up in a more protected canyon, just to the west of the Tassili cliffs. Daoudi and Lagarde, moving in silent coördination, like groundskeepers at a ballgame, spread the wing on the sand. Steinmetz put on a white helmet and knelt in front of the machine. Lagarde helped to buckle the harness around his legs and waist. Steinmetz stood up. Hunchbacked, gripping the risers above his shoulders, he hoofed the ground the way a racehorse does. He shimmied his left hip and revved the machine. It sounded like a lawnmower.
Steinmetz let the motor idle and ran like hell into the wind. With a hundred pounds on his back, he was barely moving. It looked as though he might topple backward. He kept running. Eventually, the sail inflated and swung over his head in a scarlet arc. Steinmetz opened the throttle. He ran about twenty more steps, and a space opened up between his feet and the ground.
He ascended smoothly—the sail fading, as he rose up the walls of the valley, to an eyebrow. After a minute or so, he banked hard to the right, in the direction of the cliffs. Hovering in front of them at around six hundred feet, he seemed to stall. The wing bounced and shook. Steinmetz, in the first rays of light, was swinging beneath it like a Ferris-wheel car.
On the ground, a handheld radio hissed.
“Radio, radio, I want François.”
“Hello, George?”
“I think it’s a katabatic.”
A katabatic wind sends cold, dense air pouring down a slope. Steinmetz, in front of the plateau, was stuck in the atmospheric equivalent of white water. Buffeted by the current, he lofted and dropped like a yo-yo, a man on strings. The altimeter kept beeping. A sailor can see whitecaps to indicate choppy going, but a paraglider’s safety depends on guesswork. Steinmetz opened the throttle and attempted to climb out of the turbulence.
“Try to go now over the cliff,” Lagarde radioed.
“I’m at a thousand feet. Wind’s coming out of the northeast. It’s still funny.”
“So we can’t make it?”
A few seconds passed in silence.
“I’m coming down.”
Steinmetz made a wide turn away from the cliffs and buzzed off into the distance. Daoudi jumped into the flight car. One hand on the wheel, another on the radio, he sped away from the takeoff site, scanning the landscape for flecks of red.
“George, George, do you hear me?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Do you land?”
“I’m on the ground.”
“Are you in the route to Djanet?”
“Roger, roger.”
Daoudi barrelled down the road, honking the horn.
“George, do you hear me?”
The radio crackled.
Daoudi made a U-turn and headed back up the road. Ten minutes passed. I started to think that the proverb about the needle in the haystack should be changed to a person in a rock pile. Finally, Steinmetz emerged from behind some dunes, holding his helmet. His hair stuck up in matted stalagmites. The wing was crumpled in the sand.
“Salaam aleikum,” he said. “That was a death trap up there.”
The Sahara, where temperatures can reach a hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit, spans more than three million miles over eleven countries. It is one of the brightest places on earth, reflecting ninety per cent of the light that reaches its crust. It is also one of the driest—most areas receive fewer than three inches of rain in a year. The Harmattan wind, at its strongest, blows from the end of November to the beginning of March. It can pick up a particle of dust in Algeria and put it down in Venezuela. The Sahara is almost as big as the United States, but, aside from a few colonial-era balises and cairns, it offers as road markers only a dizzying procession of sand and rocks, rocks and sand. In 1942, twelve members of the South African Air Force landed three Bristol Blenheim bombers somewhere between the oasis at Kufra and the Rebiana erg. After a couple of days, the men were drinking the alcohol from their compasses and gun sights. “Boys are going mad wholesale—they want to shoot each other—very weak myself,” Major J. L.V. de Wet wrote. The next day: “We expect to be all gone today. Death will be welcome—we went through hell.”
For the unlucky, or the unprepared, the Sahara offers all manner of torment—diarrhea, dehydration, sunburn, sandstorms, dust storms, land mines, bandits. (“Sahara Overland,” by Chris Scott, the premier English-language guide to independent travel in the region, devotes a section called “Dealing with Robbery” to the relative merits of fuel-cutout switches.) The harshness of the Sahara has made it isolated, which has made it attractive to profiteers and misfits and thrill-seekers for the very reasons that it repels most other people. In 1900, Isabelle Eberhardt, a twenty-two-year-old Swiss woman suffering a “fruitful, salutary melancholia,” travelled to Algeria, where she lived much of the rest of her life as Mahmoud Essadi, a Muslim and a man. Nowadays, a particular sort of French person is big on Saharan holidaying. The culture of nostalgic self-sufficient mobility—schoolteachers and accountants, loosed from decades of desk work, recapturing the former glory of their homeland on the open road—is not unlike that of R.V.s in America. Mitteleuropeans also feel the call. There is a literature of off-roading: Motorrad, Tourenfahrer Magazin. I was told that someone had seen a German man, dressed in black socks and sandals, making laps under the noonday sun with a pair of hiking poles.
The Sahara is the traditional home of the Tuareg people, descendants of nomadic Berber pastoralists whose ancestral lands cover a million and a half square kilometres of Algeria, Libya, Mali, and Niger. In the main Tuareg dialect, Tamashek, the Sahara is Tinariwen—one of many words meaning desert. Herodotus described a people who some historians think were linked to the Tuareg’s forebears: “Above these towards the South Wind in the region of wild beasts dwell the Garamantians, who fly from every man and avoid the company of all.”
The French captured Algiers in 1830 but largely ignored the Grand Sud and les hommes bleus, as the Tuareg were known, for their indigo veils, the pigment of which eventually soaked into the skin. In 1881, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Flatters led an expedition south toward the Hoggar Mountains to investigate the possibility of building a trans-Saharan railroad. His men were routed by the Tuareg in what came to be known as the Flatters massacre, as William Langewiesche writes in “Sahara Unveiled” (1996). Fifty-nine survivors attempted a retreat. They ate their dogs, they ate their camels, they ate poisoned dates offered to them by the Tuareg. Eventually, they ate one another. It was not until 1904, after the Battle of Tit, that the French established loose governance over the region.
Still, the geographical isolation of the Tuareg and French romanticization of their life style afforded them significant autonomy. The French saw the Tuareg as mystical warrior-aristocrats, elegant in body and haughty in bearing. The French Nobel laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio writes in “Desert,” his 1980 novel, “The blue men moved along the invisible trail to Smara, freer than any creature in the world could be. . . . The bare feet of the women and children touched the sand, leaving light prints that the wind erased immediately. . . . And the men themselves were like mirages, born unto the desert earth in hunger, thirst, and weariness.” Unsurprisingly, there have been several romance novels written about the Tuareg, and they do not sound all that different.
When Algeria gained its independence, in 1962, Tuareg society still comprised a small, ruling caste of nobles; a lower, tributary class; and a third class, of slaves and vassals. Independence brought socialism to Algeria; then came a program of Arabization—the replacement of French with Arabic—and an increasing identification with Islam. During Algeria’s civil war, in the nineteen-nineties, tourism suffered. The anthropologist Jeremy Keenan writes that the Tuareg sometimes refer to visitors from the north of Algeria as “Taiwan”—cheap versions of the Europeans who used to come. In 2003, thirty-two European tourists were abducted by masked men near Djanet. Still, plenty of people visit the area, because it is worth visiting. More than thirst or violence, the dangerous thing about the southern Sahara is its power to disorient the senses, to make people become lost, leading to all the familiar disasters. But the way that the desert plays with scale is also what makes it a photographer’s paradise. A crater might be a footprint; corrugated channels in the sand could be the traces of armies or ants.
Once the Land Cruiser was repaired, we set out for Tadrart, a plateau in the corner of land where Algeria meets Libya and Niger. After a day of rough driving, we reached a place called the Black Dunes—sinuous mounds of yellow sand topped with fine black spores, like mold on ladyfingers. We made camp in the leeward crook of a sixty-foot-high crescent dune. Daoudi scampered up its slipface, and motioned for me to follow. “Vitesse! ” he yelled, hoisting me over the crest. Atop the dune, I took off my shoes and nudged a bit of sand with my toes. It was very clean. Probably no one had ever touched it. It poured down the slope like batter, leaving a drippy trail. The sun was disappearing in the west; clouds like tire tracks streaked the sky. By the time we came down, I was practically in tears.
“You’re going to get great pictures tomorrow,” I said to Steinmetz.
“It’s sunset,” he replied. “It’s like that old saying, ‘Anybody looks good after three drinks.’ ”
The next morning, we got up at five-thirty. Steinmetz, huddled by the fire, was still brooding about Sefar. “I guess you can’t kill an elephant with a penknife,” he said, draining a cup of coffee and pulling on his boots.
An hour later, we were in the flat of a basin, surrounded by low knuckles and mounds. The moon was a sliver. Steinmetz stood in front of the wing, which was splayed on the ridge of a finely veined dune.
Steinmetz ran down the slope and took off easily. He made a series of smooth wide turns, gaining altitude as though he were climbing a spiral staircase. Nearly the entire spectrum was visible on the western horizon. At seven, the sun popped over the hills, turning everything sticky and golden.
Steinmetz flew for half an hour before the radio blared.
“I’m at fourteen hundred feet, and I’m not seeing much,” he said. “It’s going to be a short flight.”
The rest of the day, we drove around through wormy passes and primordial valleys, looking for geological exemplars or oddities that Steinmetz might want to shoot. He browsed a few rock-art sites. He stopped to look at a boulder wallpapered with feathery fossils that used to be seaweed. Mostly, there were sandstone pillars, molded by the Saharan winds into amusing facsimiles: pig, lighthouse, porcupine, cleaver, Martini glass, mushroom, gas pump. Steinmetz’s line of work requires physical fortitude as much as it does an aesthetic sensibility—a great aerial photographer is, among other things, someone whose hands don’t freeze at two thousand feet. Unusually, he possesses equal measures of talent and stamina. “The places where he’s going, it’s not like doing ‘Aerial Paris,’ ” Kathy Moran, Steinmetz’s editor at National Geographic, told me. “When he lands, he’s not going to have a drink with an umbrella in it. He puts himself out there to make images of places most people don’t see from the ground, much less the air.”
Our new navigator, Lamine, who had taken over from Jafar, asked the driver to stop the car near a narrow pillar with a spherical top.
“Look, it’s the World Cup,” he said.
“Who cares?” Steinmetz muttered. “This is tourist stuff. In China, they’re always, like, ‘This is Emperor Feng Dao’s big toe.’ ”
That evening, we arrived at Tin Merzouga, a sandy basin to the southeast of Tadrart. The dunes were as high as houses. Undulating into the distance, they approached abstraction—Ellsworth Kellys in sky and sand. Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.
“Extraordinary,” Steinmetz said, as he set up his tent. “In the morning, this place is going to rock.”
At the campfire, Jafar made tagella, the traditional Tuareg bread, combining flour and water in a bowl and pounding the mixture into dough, which he buried in the sand and covered with smoking coals. He poured three rounds of sugary tea—“the first as hard as life, the second as sweet as love, the third as light as death.” Somebody pulled up a car and put on some Tuareg music: guitar, drums, ululations, handclaps. As we ate and joked and gawked at the stars, Steinmetz stood off to the side. He had propped his Mac on the hood of one of the Land Cruisers, where he stood, barefoot, studying maps and organizing files. By the time the last embers had died, and everyone had flopped into sleeping bags or passed out on top of dirty striped mats, he was still standing there, silhouetted in blue light.
The earliest pictures of Steinmetz show him in a big house in Beverly Hills, surrounded, on various nicely upholstered pieces of furniture, by his older siblings, Don (a preservationist), Julie (a psychologist), and Diane (who, with her husband, runs an African-art gallery in Los Angeles). His mother, the former Verna Pace, was a 1945 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford. His father, David Henry Steinmetz III, a lumber heir who became a stockbroker, collected Munch and Johns. Family lore has it that when Steinmetz was a little boy, chasing a ball in the street, Groucho Marx almost ran him over. One of his friends was Todd Fisher, whose mother, Debbie Reynolds, used to embarrass the boys by picking them up from school in a Rolls-Royce. Steinmetz’s other best friend had an ice-cream-sundae bar at his house. When Steinmetz was five, his parents divorced. He was closer to his mother, but his father, who had a degree in mechanical engineering from Caltech, exposed him to machines and to nature, and to the ways that a mastery of one could deepen an understanding of the other. A bow-tie-wearing gallant, he would pack the kids in his Cessna on weekends and fly them to the old family house in the Sierras.
“George continues to get out of his seat, wander around the room, and talk despite warnings, detention, etc. Even when complying he does so with a defiant grin,” Steinmetz’s fourth-grade progress report reads. At the Harvard Westlake school, he spent part of his junior year as an exchange student in Tokyo. He remembers himself as a loner. On his Stanford application, in response to the prompt “If you could write a book, what would it be about?,” Steinmetz replied that, since he didn’t know anything about anybody else, he would write an autobiography entitled “The Growing Up of Helmer Boogerknuckle.” Still, at his high-school graduation Steinmetz was named Most Improved Student. “We got more of our money’s worth than the rest of those guys,” he remembers his father saying.
Stanford didn’t really turn Steinmetz on. The summer after his sophomore year, eager to experience life outside the Gucci Ghetto—his name for Beverly Hills—he got a Eurail Pass and flew to Europe with a friend. The pass was good for Morocco, where Steinmetz experienced, for the first time, the perverse gratification of finite hardship—two-dollar funduqs, cheap lunches of pear cactus. “We rented mopeds and drove around with these big bottles of cheap wine and slept on the beach,” Steinmetz recalled of his European idyll.
Three years into Stanford, Steinmetz had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He spent some time in Telluride as a ski bum, and, in January, 1979, set out for what he later called “a real dirtbag safari.” Steinmetz spoke no French, let alone Arabic. In Agadez, Niger, on the side of the road, he met a Belgian ethnologist named Marion van Offelen, who for five months became his travelling companion. In what was then the Central African Empire, they tracked elephants with Baaka pygmies. In N’Djamena, Chad, in the midst of a civil war, they “dined in restaurants filled with drunk mercenaries, where frozen pizzas had been flown in from Paris, and the customers would set a loaded pistol on one side of their plate and a hand grenade on the other,” Steinmetz later wrote. “By day we went waterskiing on the river while watching out for hippos, and by night we danced to Boney M. and ABBA in rented houses while drinking Johnnie Walker.”
The trip was not without its hairy moments. Despite precautions—always eat at the busiest food stall on the street; it’s O.K. to drink anything that comes out of a pipe—Steinmetz developed all manner of ailments (according to one letter, “a bad cold, an eye infection, bedbug bites, the trots, and a hive-like body rash”). Still, he revelled in self-sufficiency. In August of 1979, at Horombo Hut, on Kilimanjaro, Steinmetz wrote in his triplicate book of a midnight climb in freshly fallen snow: “I reached the top, out of breath, for sunrise. After eating some crackers and cheese, I mustered the strength to go on from Gilman’s Point to Uhuru Peak—19,340.” Steinmetz and members of a French Alpine club took one another’s pictures by the Tanzanian colors that mark the summit. “I asked the remaining few if they wanted to accompany me into the crater, but no one was interested,” Steinmetz wrote. “I felt the pull and set off alone.”
Before leaving home, Steinmetz had borrowed a cheapo Konica camera from his brother. It broke. He got another one—a 35-mm. Olympus OM-1—from a friend who was heading home. Steinmetz found the guise of photographer a great excuse for poking his nose into whatever he wanted. From Niamey and Bangui and wherever else he could find a post office, he mailed cannisters of film to his mother. Verna was not initially thrilled. (Her take on photographers: “They all have bad breath and B.O.”) Eventually, she started to come around to the idea, sending George detailed critiques of his developed pictures—“Roll 14, it’s overexposed”—along with frequent care packages. In 1981, Steinmetz wrote to “Mom-O” from Goma, Zaire, “I would appreciate it if you could send me a pair of Levis straight-leg shrink to fit jeans, size 32W 34L, one tan Patagonia long sleeve shirt size large, and 20 packs Gudang Garam king size. Would also appreciate it if you could shrink the jeans and undervalue the merchandise 50% on the customs declaration.”
After about a year, Steinmetz returned to California wearing a Chinese T-shirt and flip-flops (no socks, no wash). He finished Stanford and got an internship with an oil company. That didn’t stick. Hoping to place his pictures in magazines, he went back to Africa, and, when that didn’t work out, either, he settled in San Francisco, where he drove a VW bus called Lady Fatima and got a job taking out the trash for a studio photographer. He was fired for insubordination. His second job was for a photojournalist, Ed Kashi, who also fired him. He and Kashi remained close friends, however, and Kashi started passing on jobs to Steinmetz. His first paying gig was for the magazine California—a portrait of a psychic stockbroker, whom he sat in an “Addams Family” chair and lit from below, in what photographers call the Frankenstein effect. Shortly thereafter, Steinmetz shot Linus Pauling. He told Pauling that when he was a kid he’d had a snake named Linus Crawling, eliciting a wonderful smile. California put the picture on the cover.
Steinmetz had a breakthrough in 1986, when GEO assigned him to chronicle the opening of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. He attended a toga party for high rollers, talked his way into the “goddess” dressing room—experiences that the magazine memorialized in an eighteen-page spread. One of the pictures shows a newlywed couple in a hot tub. “I met these people, and they were, like, dry-humping in the pool,” Steinmetz recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got the honeymoon suite this afternoon. How would you guys like to have some champagne?’ ”
In 1989, National Geographic ran its first Steinmetz story, about oil exploration around the world—one shot showed an exhausted rig worker using a sack of dynamite for a pillow. After that, Steinmetz was a Geographic regular. In 1995, he travelled to the backcountry of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, to photograph the tree-dwelling Korowai and Kombai people. Accompanied by a Dutch anthropologist, he spent six weeks on the ground attempting to cross the pacification line—the indistinct border between tree dwellers who had touched modernity and those who hadn’t. The pictures are extraordinary: a woman scurrying up a notched pole to her house, a man with a freshly killed cassowary slung over his shoulder; another, dwarfed by branches, foraging for breadfruit in the forest canopy. So that he could be at the same level as his subjects, Steinmetz had an archer shoot a lead-tipped arrow with a reel of fishing line attached to it over a high branch and affix some ropes, so that he could climb up. A picture from the time shows Steinmetz, in a Lacoste polo and khaki shorts, under a red-and-white golf umbrella, straddling a tree thirty feet in the air. Two years later, outside Paris, Steinmetz made his first flight in the paraglider. He remembers green grass and hedgerows. It was his fortieth birthday.
When Steinmetz isn’t sleeping in a tent or a truck, he lives in a pale-yellow Victorian house in Glen Ridge. From the street, the only hints that it is not the redoubt of an insurance agent or a stockbroker are two metal signs nailed above the garage door. One of them is a yellow crossing diamond with a llama in the middle. “I tell the kids it’s on loan from a mine in Bolivia,” Steinmetz said. Next to it is a triangle edged in red, with an image of a one-humped camel, a souvenir of Saudi Arabia. Steinmetz, pulling in to the driveway one January afternoon, said, “I wanted a Bactrian one instead of a dromedary, but I didn’t see any.”
Steinmetz had been home from Algeria for about three weeks. He was wearing a white turtleneck and a heather-gray sweater, woollen clogs peeking out from the hems of his jeans. His hair was short. His fingernails were clean. He led me through the garage and out to a wooden deck that overlooked a spacious back yard. There was a trampoline and a tree house. Steinmetz continued down a set of steps—“Be careful, there’s ice there”—to the frozen-over rows of a garden. He said, “We do tomatoes—they’re the big thing—and then some herbs and spices.”
In the kitchen, copper pots hung from the ceiling. Paperwhites wilted near a gallery of kids’ art work, as a hamster named Butterfinger rustled around in a plastic castle. A list of rules was taped to a wall (“No Candy—EVER!”). Steinmetz laid out bread, a head of lettuce, and a jar of horseradish and took a hunk of roast beef out of the refrigerator. We made sandwiches and talked about the trip. “I always worry they’ll come back and be, like, ‘God, that guy was such an asshole,’ ” Steinmetz said, of the crew. He is content in the suburbs, until he isn’t. He said, “I’m home for two or three months, and then I run out of hotel shampoos.”
After lunch, we went upstairs to Steinmetz’s office. Cubbyholes, crammed with reference materials for upcoming assignments, lined the room’s perimeter. File cabinets were labelled alphabetically: Kajak-Korowai, Suriname-Yangtze. A ledge bore a lifetime’s haul of unpacked suitcases and emptied pockets: sand roses from Arabia, arrowheads, pottery shards, Bolivian flamingo eggs that Steinmetz had blown out with a Leatherman and a straw. “I bought these in southern Sudan when I was twenty-one,” Steinmetz said, pointing out a pair of ivory bangles. They sat near a collection of miniature models of the flying machine, fashioned from bicycle inner tubes and baling wire, by people he’d met in the course of his travels. The mouse pad was a Persian carpet.
Steinmetz pulled up a chair to one of two back-to-back Mac monitors. He had been editing his pictures from Algeria, narrowing an initial selection of ten thousand. Now, to show for six weeks’ worth of field work, he had a hundred and sixty-seven shots. He opened a file and began to scroll through a gallery. There were workers in El Oued, cutting clusters of Deglet Noor dates. The husks of the dates, in another picture, formed traceries that appeared, from the sky, like lace. Central pivot sprayers, drilling down to rain that fell in the last ice age, irrigated fields of potatoes—from above, they were a matrix of green, fuzzy polka dots. The sprayers formed radii that cut across the circles like phonograph arms.
Steinmetz proceeded to a sequence he’d shot near Timimoun, where, flying above the desert, he’d spotted an abandoned ksar, or fortified settlement. He’d come in high and shot it off center, in the bottom-right corner of the frame, foregrounding a plain of dunes that stretched as far as the eye—even the paraglider-aided one—could see. The angle emphasized the isolation of the ksar. It was a piecrust, with serrated parapets and flaky walls, that had managed to last for centuries. There was a metaphysical quality to the picture, conveying a sense of how pathetic and touching our best endeavors might appear to a skyward god. This was a yes. In another picture, Lagarde, suspended from a black-white-and-red wing, hovered above a network of foggara—underground channels that carried water from aquifers to villages. “That’s what we call ‘flying Hollywood,’ ” Steinmetz said. Keeper.
The material that Steinmetz works with is beautiful but tricky—too many sunsets and footprints in sand and you’ve got an inspirational calendar. (Recently, a Dutch couple attempted to commission Steinmetz to shoot some overhead portraits of them having sex in a desert near Dubai.) Even with the right ingredients, a flight can yield bland or cloying results. I was surprised to find that some of the places that had seemed most spectacular in person were the least impressive on the screen. At their best, Steinmetz’s photographs not only capture landscape; they transform it. “Sometimes you get an idea on the ground of how something’s going to look, but usually it’s just a big surprise,” he said. “I’ll show pictures to locals who have lived in a place for fifty years, and they won’t know what they’re looking at.” The view from the flying machine is a figurative one, highlighting odd juxtapositions and heightening or obscuring scale, in a sort of aerial alchemy. Beds of scallions become stripes. Roads become cross-hatching.
Piano music drifted up from downstairs—Nelly, who is eleven, and John and Nicolas, eight-year-old twins, had got home from school—as Steinmetz tried to decide which shots to use of Beni Isguen, the most traditional of the fortified villages of Ghardaïa. The town had a radial layout, emanating from the mosque, which loomed over a chambered mosaic of narrow alleys and high-walled houses. In one of the best shots, Steinmetz had allowed the houses to fill the frame. The image was marvellously disorienting. It could have been a cross-section or an overview. Captured at sunrise, in warm light, the houses were the color of seashells. At sunset, they were bleached out, shards of bone. Their roofs, invisible from the street, had been painted in aquas and turquoises, so that, from above, they looked like swimming pools.
“Is this one too blue?” Steinmetz asked. “That other one might be more subtle.”
As he deliberated, the computer made a whirring sound, and the screen went black.
“Bummer,” Steinmetz said. He walked down to the kitchen and put on a pot of tea.
People who could fly used to be gods. The Egyptians had Horus, the falcon-headed deity of the sky, whose left eye was the moon and whose right eye was the sun. The Greeks looked to wax-winged Icarus; the Aztecs, the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl; the ancient Ugandans, the warrior Kibaga, who could make himself invisible and rained down rocks on his enemies from a perch in the clouds. In the Bible, air is the realm of the sublime. The prophet Ezekiel, looking into the northern sky, witnesses a blazing whirlwind, “a fire infolding itself,” out of which appear four creatures, their wings “stretched upward”—soaring angels sent by a creator in Heaven.
No one knows precisely when the first human flight occurred. But, as technology evolved, the determination of man to slip his earthbound shackles became less an inchoate religious yearning and more a plausible reality: it is difficult to tell whether the Chinese legend of the emperor Shun, who, in 2230 B.C., is said to have used a pair of conical reed hats to parachute to safety from the top of a burning granary, is folklore or history. By the ninth century, Islamic tower jumpers were attempting, often disastrously, to fly. Early in the eleventh century, Brother Eilmer, a Benedictine monk, built a pair of wings, likely out of ash or willow and cloth, affixed them to his shoulders with a bow brace, and leaped from the hundred-and-fifty-foot watchtower of Malmesbury Abbey. He was able to glide for fifteen seconds, but, as a contemporary historian wrote, “agitated by the violence of the wind and a current of air, as well as by the consciousness of his rash attempt, he fell and broke his legs, and was lame ever after.” (For years, he went around telling people that if only he’d had a tail.) All this is recounted in “Taking Flight” (2003), Richard Hallion’s long, fascinating book about mankind’s eternal regret, and vexation, that we were not born crickets or kingfishers.
Flying is the thing other animals can do that humans can’t. The difficulty of defying gravity is perhaps a large part of its appeal. But even as Kitty Hawk gave way to Tailhook, and aviation became commonplace—please return your seat-back trays to their upright and locked positions—a certain novelty has endured. People thrill at kites, two thousand years after their invention. They wave at planes. This year, the announcement that DARPA—the gee-whiz arm of the Department of Defense—was attempting to develop flying cars elicited more than a hundred comments on USAToday.com. (“How about just flying over the toll booths!” someone wrote.) The ado was almost juvenile. Like X-ray machines and glass-bottom boats, flying machines are marvellous because they are useful but also because they transcend our genetic limitations, affording another way of seeing the world.
One sunny afternoon in Tin Merzouga, something I had been dreading happened: Steinmetz asked me if I wanted to fly. My take on flying, previous to this offer, was something like that of the Bactrians, who surrendered to Alexander the Great after he made them believe that his men had flown to the summit of the Rock of Arimazes: don’t tempt fate. Before boarding a plane, I usually perform an elaborate knocking ritual. Mostly because I didn’t want everyone to think I was a weenie, I agreed to give the paraglider a try. I would fly without the motor.
As I squatted in the sand, Steinmetz and Lagarde helped me into the harness, which felt like a heavy backpack. I stood up, and handed my sunglasses to Steinmetz. Lagarde stationed himself in front of me, pulling on the harness to keep me upright. I was standing on the top of a fifty-foot dune, looking down upon a semicircular valley, where Daoudi, whom I could barely make out, stood waving his arms in encouragement.
I threaded the green and purple lines between my thumbs and forefingers and held the risers above my shoulders, like dumbbells. I ran down the slope. I ran more. It didn’t seem that anything was happening, except that my back, under the weight of the wing, was bending in a way that I hadn’t known was possible. It was as if the ground were reeling in a fish, and I were the pole. Somehow, after a few seconds, I realized that there was nothing under my feet. The takeoff was peaceful—a levitation, not a jump. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that planes separate from the ground “with a movement like picking a flower.” Maybe I was a bit of dandelion fuzz, loosed from its floret.
In dreams—mine, at least—flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor.
The light was perfect, and Steinmetz went up shortly after I did. He flew for more than an hour, making slow passes over crescent dunes and rock pillars. By the time he appeared again above the camp, the sky was purple and yellow. The sand looked like lava. He swooped in above a flat stretch of land near our campsite, and, descending too quickly, made a rough landing on his coccyx. It had been cold up there at two thousand feet. Steinmetz was sniffling. He could barely move his fingers, but he had taken seven hundred pictures. ♦
