Brookfield Properties
George Steinmetz
Brookfield Properties' Arts Brookfield initiative supports innovation in music, dance, theater, film, and visual art by pushing boundaries to create unique works of art and cultural experiences presented for free. The program works with artists and consultants such as AG Global creates free exhibitions in the public spaces of Brookfield Properties.
The touring exhibition was comprised of large-scale photographs from George Steinmetz’s Desert Air series. The award-winning National Geographic photographer spent fifteen years documenting the world’s extreme deserts from the air, using the lightest and slowest motorized paraglider that exists, to capture some of the world’s most remote environments.
Exhibition Background
DESERT AIR
George Steinmetz set out to photograph all of the world’s extreme deserts. To get aloft in such remote places he learned how to fly the world’s lightest and slowest aircraft, a motorized paraglider. His foot-launched aircraft gave him the ability to see these seldom visited areas in a way that has never been realized before.
The Desert Air project took him to 27 countries plus Antarctica to create the first comprehensive photographic book on all of the world’s hyper arid deserts. These include the most remote and inhospitable place on earth, from the summits of the Andes to the shores of the Dead Sea. Steinmetz ventured from the hottest place on earth, in the Afar Depression of Ethiopia, to the coldest in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.
What many people believe to be wastelands, he found to be the last great class of wilderness left on
our planet. In these austere environments he discovered extraordinary perseverance of life at the very limit of survival, and fragile landscapes and ecosystems that are in need of conservation.
