Ella Maillart’s “Récits photographiques”

In the summer of 1939, the Swiss writer and photographer Ella Maillart drove from Geneva to Kabul in a brand new Ford De Luxe Coupe, weighed down with suitcases, books, typewriters, bedding, a tent, water tanks, an extra gas tank, a second spare tire, a toolbox, a medicine chest, bags of food, pots, pans, film canisters, extra negatives, and five cameras, including two Leicas (one of them later stolen) and a “ciné” for making movies. Maillart was traveling with her friend and fellow writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Just months before the outbreak of World War II, people flashed their car with Nazis salutes as they rolled through southern Europe.

Schwarzenbach, who did most of the driving, was an heiress, the daughter of a Swiss industrialist, and an anti-fascist who hated her parents and hated her dependence on them even more. The car had been a gift from her dad. “Like an over-ripe melon, the chassis began to open as soon as we hit the bad roads of Yugoslavia,” Maillart wrote in The Cruel Way (1947), her breathtaking account of the journey.1 The doors didn’t close and the fuel tanks leaked. And yet, they crossed from Sofia to Istanbul, jammed the Ford onto a ship, and floated across the Black Sea, continued through Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran, and swooped into Afghanistan so full of euphoria that when they were abruptly stopped by two soldiers pointing rifles at their windshield, Maillart burst out laughing at “so perfect an introduction” to their destination.2

Maillart had many reasons to make this journey but novelty wasn’t one of them. She was a serious athlete who had sailed across the Mediterranean and competed in the 1924 Paris Olympics. Increasingly disillusioned with the false promises of a peaceful Europe, she had been traveling extensively for a decade. She had already been to Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, and had ventured across Central Asia, the Soviet Union, northern China, and the surreal Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. By 1939, Maillart was hoping to find another way of living and a better version of herself. Perhaps for that reason, the most striking photographs from her travels, a hundred of which are now on view at Lausanne’s Photo Elysée, are mirror images of women and photographers at work.

In Uzbekistan in 1932, Maillart photographed two women with smart overcoats and magnificent monobrows standing in front of an open-air portrait studio. The same year in Kyrgyzstan, she captured another two women digging canals. They looked at her looking at them with a crackling mix of curiosity and defiance. Maillart took pictures of women gathering cotton, spinning wool, farming, and baking bread. Her photograph of a man in Manchuria, squeezing one eye shut while using the other to peer through the viewfinder of a camera that could be his, or hers, exemplifies the light touch with which Maillart handled considerable ambiguities (she was drawn to those of gender, place, language, and position, especially as eruptions of conflict shifted the vocations of young men from citizens to soldiers). In another photograph of an outdoor portrait studio, a family of five sits beneath a painted backdrop next to a kiosk whose open doors show off the proprietor’s work. Bystanders gather to watch. A few turn to face Maillart. In the middle distance, the photographer who owns the kiosk—and who is ostensibly Maillart’s subject—is arranging the family portrait in front of his camera while she, behind hers, takes in the whole scene.

Highly sensitive to circumstance, Maillart never developed a unified set of photographic strategies. In her images of the Bamyan Buddhas, her attention appears genuinely, endearingly torn between the enormous stone sculptures and a group of men gathered to the side. She had no standard framing. She was relatively tall but shot from low. Her landscapes are as attentive to geometry as are her photographs of architecture. Her images of mosques, castles, deserts, and mountains are rarely symmetrical, her horizons refreshingly jumbled. Maillart seems most interested in people, animals, and props, like a bust of Lenin hoisted onto a table for an outdoor tribunal in Samarkand.

“Récits photographies” celebrates the addition of Maillart’s archives to UNESCO’s “Memory of the World” register, which is similar to the list of World Heritage Sites, only for documents. But the exhibition in Lausanne only hints at what a more substantial engagement with Maillart’s life and art could be. She is beloved in Switzerland, especially in Geneva, where she was born, and in the Valais, to which she retired after living in India for the duration of World War II, still searching for answers to questions about how to live in a world maimed by war, environmental devastation, and greed. But she is barely known elsewhere, and Schwarzenbach, who was fictionalized in The Cruel Way as “Christina” thanks to the intervention of her overbearing and manipulative mother, remains totally obscure.

All the Roads Are Open (2008) is Schwarzenbach’s account of their journey, and her archives have also been added to the UNESCO register. Between them, Maillart was the better writer, and her photographs deserve to be seen as her best work (her prose can lapse into a lazy Orientalism that is absent from her images). But Schwarzenbach was an outsize character. Her gender identity was fluid, and so too her sexuality. On their way to Afghanistan, she delighted in being mistaken for Maillart’s male companion, her son, or her chauffeur. They laughed and fought and confused many people. Maillart was trying to find herself, her purpose, and a way of being in the world, but more immediately, she was trying to save Schwarzenbach from a crippling drug addiction. It didn’t work. Schwarzenbach relapsed in Bulgaria and again in Kabul. Maillart organized her return to Switzerland. They saw each other once more in India. Schwarzenbach died in a bicycle crash in 1942, aged thirty-four. Maillart wrote The Cruel Way in part to assuage her guilt and diffuse her sorrow (the title refers to Schwarzenbach’s propensity for suffering). Clearly, they loved each other, but in a complicated way that neither could ever really describe (“I don’t understand how you love me,” Schwarzenbach asks, toward the end of The Cruel Way. “I don’t know myself,” Maillart responds).3 Does any of this appear in Maillart’s photographs? The easy answer is no, not at all. But maybe it does, just a little, in the beauty she finds in shadows and gestures, in the patterns she traces on the ground and, every so often, in a face glancing back at her camera, caught in mid smile.