In his mug shot, the photographer George Steinmetz doesn’t seem especially threatening. It captures some of the inquisitive humanity that Steinmetz, a tall and direct people’s person with a John Malkovich mien, conveys in life.
On a recent drive through rural Pennsylvania, he told me how he had gotten himself jailed. It was 2013, and he was photographing wheat fields in Kansas from his motorized paraglider. Although airspace in America is not privately owned, after an hour of shooting he landed to a furious farm manager and a sheriff opening handcuffs.
“Photographers ask themselves a question,” Steinmetz said with a chuckle from behind the wheel of his Tesla. “Do we ask for permission or forgiveness?” The sunrise had been too good, and too brief, for him to find consent.
Indirectly, Kansas brought him here, to Lancaster County, on this hot September afternoon. Though the charges were dropped, his assignment that year for National Geographic — to document the increasingly global nature of the world’s food supply as the overall population nears 10 billion — has become a decade-long obsession, requiring contacts on six continents, repeat visits, much rejection and permission.
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His new book, “Feed the Planet,” with text by Joel K. Bourne Jr., features the voluminous results: some 300 photos, most of them aerial, depicting a staggering variety of food production across 40 countries. Thai crocodile farms, high-tech aeroponic labs (where roots hang suspended), armies of Indian shrimp shellers, crop circles in Kansas. (And the consequent mug shot.)
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