The extraordinary travels of Ella Maillart

September 8, 2017 Leave a reply

Ella Maillart’s Leica, from the documentary Les voyages extraordinaires d’Ella Maillart

Swiss traveller Ella Maillart was born in 1903 in Geneva of a Danish mother and a Swiss furrier father. Attractive, sporty, outdoorsy, she loved to be on the lake, especially with her childhood friend Hermine de Saussure. “Bobbed chestnut hair with a fairer lock in front, clear grey eyes, and a frank and delicate smile – there was a light in her face. Later, reading Homer, I felt that Pallas Athene must have looked like her.”

Still from the documentary Les voyages extraordinaires d’Ella Maillart

Hermine was “Miette” and Ella was “Kini”. This early pash blossomed into lifelong friendship. Surviving photos show a kind of 1920s sailor-suited lesbian chic – about which a new documentary on Maillart remains fairly circumspect. Ella played hockey, sailed, rowed and skied at a time when many sports clubs denied entry to women.

Ella Maillart (with pipe) on board her yacht.

She went on to represent Switzerland on the sailing team at the Paris Olympic Games of 1924 and to become one of those mythical between-the-wars travellers, a field dominated by British gentlemen of a certain stamp, such as Peter Fleming, whom she met and befriended in Sinkiang or Chinese Turkistan in 1935. They too became lifelong friends. She met the widow of American writer Jack London, and through that contact met Madame Tolstoy in Russia. She had a well-adjusted view of Europe’s position in the world: “Europe is a little peninsula of Central Asia.”

Traveller in furs, Peter Fleming, photographed by Ella Maillart in China, 1934

A new documentary about her life and travels, Les voyages extraordinaires d’Ella Maillart, is showing in French cinemas. I caught up with it recently in the Odeon Cinema in Morges near Lausanne, where it was screened as part of the book festival Le livre sur les quais. I was entranced from beginning to end, especially by Maillart’s photos of an Asia that has disappeared.

Director Raphaël Blanc makes wonderful use of the Maillart archive at the Élysée museum of photography in Lausanne. She was an accomplished photographer, an early user of a Leica III (a Leica F), with a good eye and an engaging manner with her subjects. That talent for friendship stood her in good stead. Peter Fleming (brother of the more famous Ian) described the advantage of the Leica:

… a large proportion of the photographs we took were taken from the saddle; and it made a lot of difference being able to hold your horse in with one hand while you focused the camera with the other.

The Golden Temple, Amritsar, India, photograph by Ella Maillart

Journalism and book publication paid for Maillart’s road trips. She wrote for Le petit parisien and other magazines of the day, and illustrated her own travel books. The film cuts between her still photographs, archival footage from the 1920s and ’30s, TV interviews with Maillart dating from the 1970s as well as contemporary interviews with people who knew her.

The documentary follows Daniel Girardin, art historian and curator of the Élysée museum, who rides and walks in Maillart’s footsteps across Central Asia. These travels are shot by Raphaël Blanc using high definition drone photography to capture the wide karst and mountain landscape of Kyrgistan and Afghanistan, the thousand year-old horse market of Karakol and scenes of transhumance that seem timeless. Maillart’s extraordinary travels, as well as her spiritual quest during the Second World War in India, are handled without too much hokus-pokus.

Ella Maillart’s luggage on the airfield, Samarkand, Ouzbekistan, URSS. 1932

In 1938 she teamed up with Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the two of them headed off in a Ford to revisit Afghanistan. Schwarzenbach was a troubled soul and addicted to morphine. The two travellers eventually parted ways. Ella’s account of their journey under the shadow of war, written after Schwarzenbach’s death, has wonderful photos of the androgynous Schwarzenbach as well as the enormous Buddha statues of Bamiyan, dating from the 4th and 5th centuries CE.

The Bamiyan Buddha, August 1939, photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach

They stood in the cliff-face niches of limestone from which they had been carved, looking out over the valley in the Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan for a millennium and a half. The Taliban dynamited them in 2001. Switzerland and Japan have pledged to reconstruct them.

Ella Maillart photo of the royal palace, Balaju, 1961

Maillart’s books and her style have dated a bit, and she was aware of her limitations as a writer. Her fellow traveller Nicholas Bouvier said of her: “I much prefer real travellers who write to writers who travel.” It’s an astute distinction.

Ella Maillart’s itineraries, courtesy of Zoé publications, 2013

Maillart retreated after the war for part of each year to the village of Chandolin, high in Switzerland’s Valais, where she kept a chalet, her books and her spiritual equilibrium. Her interest in eastern mysticism and religion was ahead of its time in the West. With this new documentary, its stunning photography and high definition aerial shots of Central Asia, perhaps more people will get to know of Maillart’s exploits and her groundbreaking life.

Philippe Vermès portrait of Ella Maillart

The tiny Ella Maillart museum at Chandolin in the Valais

The Dublin photographs of William Gedney

October 30, 2016 6 Replies

William Gedney (1932-1989) was a street photographer whose work has only gained in reputation since his early death from AIDS at the age of fifty-six. He was born in Greenville (Edgemont), Westchester County, New York, but is best known for his gritty photos of Kentucky, Calcutta and Benares in India. He also documented gay life in San Francisco and taught photography at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for many years until his untimely death.

William Gedney, Entire Cornett family on porch, 1964

©William Gedney / Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Entire Cornett family on porch, 1964

He spent time, in 1964 and again in 1972, with one large, extended family, the Cornetts, in rural Kentucky. Willy Cornett, a laid-off miner, and his wife Vivian had twelve children. From this period we see Gedney’s documentary impulse emerge, and his harking back to the Thirties photographers of the South and the Farm Security Administration (Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and others). The above family portrait echoes earlier porch photographs by these iconic photographers.

William Gedney, Boy with arms crossed, 1972

Boy with arms crossed, 1972, ©William Gedney / Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

He is fond of placing his subjects in or under cars and on front porches. He gives a kind of grease-monkey charge to his male figures. The proportion of happy accident and posed masterpiece in his photographs is high. Their grey light, the colour of wrecked car chassis and dusty oil, is a wonder to behold.

William Gedner, Boy looking out of truck bed, 1972

©William Gedney / Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Boy looking out of truck bed, 1972

Gedney was a curious, observant traveller and kept detailed notebooks. His archive at Duke University Library is full of surprises and a profitable hour or two can be spent scrolling through its images, hardly any of which saw the light of day during his lifetime. The part of his large archive which interests me records his visit to Ireland in 1974. He photographed mostly in and around Dublin, and from the evidence it must have been Horse Show weekend, an annual event in mid-August.

RDS, Dublin, 1974 ©William Gedney / Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

I have a particular affection for this group of photos because it is the Ireland I knew, during the last period of sustained time I spent in the country. The black and white mitigates against any false sense of the modern, though the signs are there, and cuts off any folksiness. In the photo above, I feel I know those formidable women at the Royal Dublin Society Show. They carry their handbags like royalty, as they have been taught to do by the nuns, and wouldn’t hesitate to poke you out of the way with their parasols. The white kid gloves and the Chanel-style suit are pure First Lady Jackie. The look of the lady on the left is gimlet eyed, the cut of the jaw not to be trifled with.

William Gedney, Nude man stretching at seashore, 1974

Nude man stretching at seashore, 1974, ©William Gedney / Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

In this photograph of the well-known south Dublin bathing place, the Forty-Foot, all the figures are isolated and distinct. The concrete proscenium breaks up the picture plane and leads the viewer’s eye out to the incoming ferry and Howth Head beyond. The gradations of washed-out grey are surprising, given the strong shadows. the eye is led in an ellipsis from youthful to ageing figure.

William Gedney, Elderly women and man on street, Dublin 1974

Elderly women and man on street, Dublin 1974, ©William Gedney / Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

This street scene (junction of Caledon Road and East Road, looking north) is in Dublin’s East Wall area, with the Bord Gáis tank at the vanishing point (now vanished!) The men are in eternal sports coats, the talking women in scarf, apron and raincoat. Again we have the strong sunlight and the picture plane centered around an angular horizon and the vertical line of the house front. Gedney captures the bleakness of that particular part of Dublin.

William Gedney, Two men talking outside horse stall, Ballsbridge, Dublin, 1974

Two men talking outside stall with horse, Ballsbridge, Dublin, 1974, ©William Gedney / Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

Conversational intimacy, the closeness of people, the surreal decapitation of the horse, make this moment in Ballsbridge full of interest. Gedney has segmented his picture into rectangles of black and white, like a chequerboard. Below, he has made the receding lines of the benches give depth of field to the boy placed dead center.

William Gedney, Boy at outdoor ampitheatre, 1974

Boy at outdoor ampitheatre, 1974, ©William Gedney / Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

William Gedney, Boy selling newspapers, 1974

The boy above selling An Phoblacht and Republican News must have been an IRA sympathiser. The slight resentment in his look reminds me it is 1974 and that trouble in Northern Ireland is in full swing. From the imposing stonework, the location must be outside the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, Dublin’s most public space and symbolic of the 1916 Easter Rising. What I like here in this portrait is the dashund collar of his shirt splayed over a dark jacket, and his quizzical look. It’s almost as if the sitter is asking: Is he Special Branch?

William Gedney, Boys leaning over and sitting on fence at races, Ballsbridge, 1974

Boys leaning over and sitting on fence at races, Ballsbridge, 1974, ©William Gedney / Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

Aran sweater, drawstring jacket, sports coats, pleated trousers, unruly hair and the big dog-eared collar again: the sartorial world of the early Seventies.

Vivian Maier in Thailand

April 24, 2016 3 Replies

I’m a great fan of the Chicago-based street photographer Vivian Maier. Her considerable body of photographic work – in black and white, in colour, in movie format – is still seeing the light of day. John Maloof, who almost by happenstance discovered her archive, makes new finds every day. Maier worked as a nanny for a number of families in Chicago. While her photos show the influence of the ambient photographic styles of the day, as you would expect, the best of her work rivals the greats. She was particularly good photographing children and the downtrodden. Her photos remind us of the underside of American prosperity, always salutary, especially in an election year.

June 5, 1959, Thailand

Though she remained mostly in Chicago and New York, she did travel to India, Puerto Rico, Canada, Yemen, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, and throughout Europe. In June 1959 she was in Thailand. Mayer kept everything meticulously filed it, so one day a full account of her travels with a camera will emerge. Meanwhile we have these three photos she took in Thailand, which caught my eye. The above temple scene is Wat Phra Si Sanphet in Ayutthaya. The soaring stupas are under a rainy-season sky, and John Maloof gives the date of June 5, 1959. The composition and contrast in shade are lovely, the temple dog almost camouflaged by the undergrowth. It’s a scene of decay and renewal.

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The self-portrait with Rolliflex could have been taken anywhere in Bangkok, but it has the look of New Road or perhaps around Hua Lampong train station. It may not even have been taken in Bangkok. A group of schoolgirls in the background could be from any decade – the uniform length hasn’t changed. Vivian is protected from the July heat by her trademark floppy hat. The wavering reflection in the mirror shows a traffic police podium and a street crossing. I like in particular the way the underside of the galvanise awning creates a crazy cross-hatching, echoed by the chaotic wiring above the street. It’s a hot, dusty, bleached Thai street scene, not too different from when I first saw the country in 1983.

June 5, 1959, Thailand

This lovely portrait shot of two children is also dated June 5 1959, so perhaps it was taken in the precinct of the same temple. The white paste on the little girls’ faces and shoulders is part of a religious ritual, a sign of protection to ward off evil – perhaps even the evil eye.

June 27, 1959, Asia

Another fine composition here in this portrait of the boatman, probably taken with the Rolliflex on her knee, so the rowing man is not particularly aware the shot is being taken. It’s dated June 27, 1959, somewhere in Asia. A further photo seems to be to have been taken in Malaysia or Indonesia, again on June 27 1959.

June 27, 1959, Asia

If you’re new to the work of Vivian Maier, go have a browse at John Maloof’s Vivian Maier site. The documentary about her is also excellent, and a trailer for it is here on YouTube. An example of one of her home movies is here, also on YouTube. You can also find my July 2014, much fuller post on Vivian Maier here.

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