"Ella Maillart was far ahead of her time: As a top athlete, photographer, and writer, the Geneva native traveled the world – alone and unmarried. Today, she serves as a role model for many women. Why is she being rediscovered?"
www.srf.ch/play/tv/kult...
No words were spoken
As giving and receiving were one
In hot summer daze
The travel photographs of Ella Maillart (1903-1997) at the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne are a vivid record of world history.
www.tagblatt.ch/kultur/ella-...
I wondered myself, but that was the only record left behind and there were no familiar features in the frame. Could have been anywhere beyond modern-day Worli or Bandra!!!
00:20:30 to 00:22:40 (2 minutes)
It was an extraordinary adventure when Ella Maillart and Annemarie Schwarzenbach set off for Kabul in 1939. Ella Maillart continued her journey to India. A new exhibition tells the story of what she experienced and why she traveled.
www.srf.ch/play/tv/-/vi...
A group of men wearing traditional attire, including prominent fur hats (papakhas) queue in front of the state store, 1932, Turtkul Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR.
'Queue In Front Of The State
Store', Ella Maillart, 1932, Turtkul Uzbek Soviet Socialist
Republic, USSR.
A block of ice from the Aral Sea in the process of being carried back to camp to be used for preparing tea. Ella Maillart, Kyzylkum Desert, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR, 1932.
'The Aral Sea Is Frozen; A Block Of Ice Will Be Used To Prepare Tea', Ella Maillart, 1932, Kyzylkum Desert, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR
A nomad walks beyond a temporary encampment with a tent and other camels in the background. He leads a Bactrian camel heavily loaded with supplies as the caravan passee through the desert.
'Li Arrives At The Camp With The Kitchen Box', Ella Maillart, 1935, Qinghai, Republic of China.
"The immensity of the horizon must be within us, must come only from us. Only those who can comprehend and understand the immensity can attain it. And only those who have found a way to express it can understand it.”
www.uzdaily.uz/en/exhibitio...
Monochrome photograph by Ella Maillart in 1932 of dome-shaped mud-brick houses in Samarkand, Uzbekistan built using locally sourced earth and without wood.
Mud-brick dome houses in Samarkand, Uzbekistan built using locally sourced earth and without wood. They are designed to stay cool in hot desert climates.
Ella Maillart, 1932
aestheticamagazine.com/ella-maillar...
Front cover photo of Annemarie Schwarzenbach's memoir of her 1939 journey to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart, fleeing Europe and exploring landscapes while reflecting on travel's loneliness and grace.
In June 1939 Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella Maillart set out from Geneva in a Ford, heading for Afghanistan. The journey documented in Annemarie's memoir is one of the most important episodes of her turbulent life.
www.amazon.com/All-Roads-Ar...
“Ella travelled a lot in Asia, especially India. She stayed in India during the Second World War. She was a strong, spiritual and inspiring human being. She delivers a strong message of freedom and as a woman I would like to pay a tribute to her."
Delphine Delas
www.thehindu.com/entertainmen...
An archive box belonging to the photographer and travel writer Ella Maillart contains organised records, including index cards and photographs, related to her travels. The visible labels specifically refer to a 1965 trip to Nepal, titled "Nepal: Visit Everest--".
The Photo Elysée museum of photography in Lausanne, Switzerland holds Ella Maillart’s photographic collection, comprising 48 map archives containing 10,000 records with original prints, 1,000 original prints, 23,700 negatives, 35 albums, 4 films and numerous slides.
elysee.ch/en/news/ella...
© Annemarie-Schwarzenbach.-British-India-Bombay-Mumbai-The-Ford-on-a-street-alongside-wooden-carts-1939–1940.-Swiss-Literary-Archives-SLA-Annemarie-Schwarzenbach-estate
Photo by Ella Maillart's companion, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, of her Ford car in a street in Bombay, India alongside wooden carts in January 1940. The car bears a "CH" sticker, indicating its Swiss registration.
www.cenl.org/the-estates-...
Women at work in a wooden ski factory, Moscow, Ella Maillart, 1930.
In the 1930s, Ella Maillart played a key role in transforming travel writing – then a male dominated field – into a fully-fledged literary and visual genre driven by women.
elysee.ch/en/news/ella...
#Photography #Feminism #Gender #Russia #EllaMaillart #Travel #Writing #Spirituality #Switzerland
Photo of Ella Maillart and Michel Le Bris
"She lived for five years near Ramana Maharishi — a spiritual journey recounted in Ti-Puss. [...] She would write no more, as if, at the end of the road, there were only Silence for her …"
www.etonnants-voyageurs.com/Ella-Maillar...
Ella Maillart (1903-1997), undated photograph. © Keystone / Photopress-Archiv / Str
At home everywhere and nowhere, Ella Maillart was an inveterate nomad. In her spiritual quest, she turned away from the 'objective world', whose caricature and invasive influences she constantly denounced, to discover a universe that suited her.
Gérard A. Jaeger
www.sept.info/ella-maillar...
Photo by Ella Maillart of the market in front of the Mir-i Arab Madrasa, a prominent 16th-century Islamic educational institution in Bukhara, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR, 1932.
Ella Maillart's travelled extensively throughout the Soviet Union, China, Afghanistan, Iran and India.
She left behind 48 boxes containing hundreds of cards with over 1,000 images and handwritten captions - reliving her travels and revealing her worldview.
sichtbar.art/blog-uebersi...
Others are keen to see if natives other than us live better than we do,without heat in pipes, ice in boxes, sunshine in bulbs, music on disks, or images gliding over a pale screen. Ella Maillart, Forbidden Journey
Ella Maillart had a spiritual approach to travel, often questioning whether modern technology truly made life better or just more complicated and disconnected.
In Forbidden Journey, she contrasts the frantic and materialistic life of the West with the simpler lives of indigenous peoples.
A Kyrgyz eagle hunter, known as a Berkutchi, riding through the mountains of Central Asia with a golden eagle perched on his arm. Eagle hunting is an ancient tradition practiced by nomadic tribes in Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia for survival and companionship. Berkutchi develop a deep bond with their birds, training them over several years to hunt small game. These hunters typically wear traditional clothing and use handmade leather equipment for their eagles.
Kyrgyzstan, 1932, Ella Maillart
A Kyrgyz eagle hunter, known as a Berkutchi, riding through the mountains of Central Asia with a golden eagle perched on his arm.
elysee.ch/en/exhibitio...
Nostalgia and the Spectacle of Modernity One could not help wondering about the Tibetans away to the south .... They shut themselves up in their mystical Buddhism and only allow the twentieth century to penetrate drop by drop, so as to be assimilated gradually. On the other hand, Siberia in the north,under the lash of the second Five Years Plan, is being mechanized.What, exposed between the two influences, and still Moslem, is Central Asia going to do? Will it revolt against the priests or against the agents of Russian manufactured goods through whom its own artisan class is disappearing? Serving alternately as a Chinese frontier against the hordes of the Occident and as a buffer for Russia against the growing imperialism of Japan, is it possible for it to become independent and remain true to itself? Ella Maillart (1937)
www.cambridge.org/core/books/t...
A man looks through Ella Maillart's 'magic lantern' in Weichang, in the ancient province of Jehol, Manchuria, 1934.
Photo by Ella Maillart of a man looking through her 'magic lantern' on market day at Weichang in the ancient province of Jehol, Manchuria, 1934.
sichtbar.art/blog-uebersi...
Sources of the Syr-Darya and summit of Sari-Tor, 1932, Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR.
Photo by Ella Maillart of the sources of the Syr-Darya and summit of Sari-Tor, 1932, Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR.
sichtbar.art/blog-uebersi...
In 1939, the author Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the ethnologist Ella Maillart travel together by car to Kabul. Their journey from Geneva via the Balkans and Turkey to Persia, is compounded by the inner world of emotions with a tender love story.
youtu.be/C06_3gvV81o
Photograph by Ella Maillart. Rubber stamp on the back of the print: 'PHOTO ELLA MAILLART / 10 av.Gaspard-Vallette / GENÈVE'. University of Bristol, Historical Photographs of China reference number: JC-s302.
Forbidden City just inside the Meridian Gate and showing the River of Golden Water.
Ella Maillart, University of Bristol, Historical Photographs of China reference number: JC-s302.
loeildelaphotographie.com/en/photo-ely...
Ella Maillart, Au col d’Ak-Ogouz, 1932, République soviétique socialiste autonome kirghize, URSS © Ella Maillart Estate and Photo Elysée, Lausanne.
"the work of Ella Maillart stands out for its rare combination of curiosity, independence and empathy. Her photographs do not merely catalogue distant landscapes but attempt to trace the rhythms of everyday life across regions undergoing profound change."
aestheticamagazine.com/ella-maillar...
Image by Ella Maillart of men in Beiping (modern-day Beijing) gathered to read the latest news posted on a public bulletin board. This form of public information sharing was a common method of dissemination before widespread television or internet access. The sign on the left of the photo reads 'Harmony and Prosperity (和順德), while the bulletin board header reads 'Beiping Daily News Publication Agency (北海日報社煮貼)'.
Photo Elysée - Photographic Stories of Ella Maillart
loeildelaphotographie.com/en/photo-ely...
In 1990, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne presented the very first retrospective devoted to the travel photographs of Ella Maillart. In order to prepare for this exhibition, the museum's director, Charles-Henri Favrod, traveled to Chandolin to meet her personally.
www.rts.ch/archives/199...
![The new railway line between Nanyo and Ninguta, west of Vladivostok, 1934, Japanese Korea. [Ella Maillart Estate and Elysée Photo]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:wbblprsobowc3zts6estviis/bafkreigz5chi3onfhdcrm3yb2k4ca6cj7x3lflml5qsuvxz2v76ampcghi)
The new railway line between Nanyo and Ninguta, west of Vladivostok, 1934, Japanese Korea. [Ella Maillart Estate and Elysée Photo]
The new railway line between Nanyo and Ninguta, west of Vladivostok, Japanese Korea.
Ella Maillart, 1934
loeildelaphotographie.com/en/photo-ely...
Ella Maillart. Sur les routes de l'Orient. Actes Sud, Musée de l'Elysée, Musée Olympique. 2003.
Documents in photos the extensive travels of Swiss explorer and photographer Ella Maillart (1903–1997). It showcases her journeys across Asia, including Turkey, Iran and Central Asia during the 1930s, featuring her work as both a skilled photographer and adventurer.
www.abebooks.com/first-editio...