Gallery Xin Dong Cheng III, Pékin

La Chine d'Ella Maillart

In collaboration with the French and Swiss Embassies in China, the Musée de l’Elysée presents a special Ella Maillart exhibition at the Xin Dong Cheng III gallery in Beijing and the Nawamukamu Theatre in Kashgar.

Gifted with an extraordinary energy and an intelligent curiosity, Ella Maillart (1903-1997), after having for a long time navigated on the seas, goes for her first “land trip” to Moscow in 1930. This kind of journey, which was really rare at that time if done without any political purposes, sets her definitely on the “long road to the east” and will influence her carrier as a writer and a photographer.

When we look retrospectively at the life of Ella Maillart, nothing seems to happen by chance. This first trip was financed by the widow of Jack London (50 dollars) whom she met in Berlin. In the Soviet capital, she took her first pictures with the help of the great cineaste Vsevolod Poudovkine who gave her advises and support. Her first Leica was given to her by Dr. Leitz in person, who was impressed by the pictures she took in Russian Turkestan in 1932. She discovered the Kyrgyz, the Kazakh, and the Uzbek people on her way back through Frunze, Tachkent and Samarcande, without any official authorizations.

At the Soviet border, on the top of the Tian Shan Mountains, reached with the company of scientists, she saw for the first time the Chinese Takla-Makan, a forbidden country that she will eventually visit despite all the difficulties in 1935 with the British writer Peter Fleming. This incredible journey of 8 months will take them from Beijing to Srinagar, Kashmir.
She practices a kind of photography that is free and mobile, characterized by an immediate sober aesthetic, that leaves in people’s mind a feeling of freedom and to our eyes a sense of keenness. If her pictures often seem ethnological, they never give the impression to have been stolen. They reflect a certain kind of exchange and a feeling of respect, which is an important aspect of their beauty.

Ella Maillart has lived with a taste for differences. She avoided the fast and superficial reportages and wrote books about her experiences and encounters in a substantial way.
She embodies this new generation of independent women who became in the thirties photographers, writers or journalists, like Marianne Breslauer, Gerta Taro or her friend Annemarie Schwarzenbach.
Her photographs show the observation qualities and originality that characterized her personality. Beyond our obvious nostalgia for the past she shows us, her pictures touches upon the essence of humanity and illustrate the deep interest that she always had in others as fellow human being.