George Steinmetz

The Empty Quarter is both the world’s largest sand sea and one of the hottest places on earth and has only been traversed a handful of times. George made three paragliding trips into the sands, first for GEO in Saudi Arabia, and then returned two years later to go from Riyadh to Oman and Yemen for National Geographic, and finally made a personal trip to the southernmost reaches of the U.A.E. to complete fieldwork for his second book. What he found was one of the most beautiful and unseen wilderness on earth. On a human level, the sands attract the two sides of Arabia… the oil camps that have transformed the economies of the Persian Gulf, and the Bedouins who still cling to their desert traditions, and offer a level of hospitality that is truly humbling. This body of work would simply not have been possible without their kindness.