About the book
The Weight of Air follows a year on the road through deserts, temples, and cities of light. It is a luminous travel memoir that blends photography, art, and reflection, an odyssey across continents and through the inner life.
Steven Boone wrote it, photographed it, and designed it, and the pages move between image and word the way a journey moves between landscape and thought.
A short film
Photographs from the journey that became the book.
From the book
Preparing to give myself into the unknown, my thoughts were becoming doorways; portals into experience. The physical world, I understood, was where the true value of my visions would be revealed. A recurring desire took hold of me: I want to disappear into the matrix of the earth. Not to carry anything with me, but to become fluid and free.
What did this mean? To disappear—to vanish from being seen as a separate, formed being and dissolve into oneness with life. Life, the vast, interwoven fabric where everything is connected—people, events, places, emotions, and time. I desired to be in this matrix, surrendering to the flow, allowing experiences to inspire and shape me rather than trying to control them. Children remained close to this, still forming in its embrace, unbound by the boundaries that adults constructed.
From The Weight of Air, page 4
What readers are saying
“Lovely Steven. Gorgeous photos and beautifully evocative writing.”
“I can hear the tinkle of those goat bells, having spent time in Ibiza tending sheep while living with others in a dirt floored hovel where we cooked our meals over the open fireplace. Magic indeed. I love your writing.”
“Love this work, an awesome read.”
About the author
Steven Boone is a painter, photographer, and writer whose work spans more than four decades. His memoir The Weight of Air won the 2026 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Best Memoir, and his earlier memoir A Heart Traced in Sand won the same award from the North American Bookdealers Exchange in 2001.
His painting Van Gogh, All Hung Up is in the permanent collection of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France, and his photographs have appeared on the covers of books and magazines, including Nora Roberts’s Album de Boda and Dominique Simonnet’s Délivrez-nous du Corps.
After living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for most of his life, he moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2019, where he and his wife, the artist Amy Córdova, share a home studio.
Read it for what feels right
The complete digital edition includes the PDF, flipbook, and ePub. Suggested $18, and you may enter any amount.
Get the digital editionPrefer not to pay online? Write to me at sb@stevenboone.com and we’ll arrange another way.