Motoring through the Maghreb
Photo album.
Oblong 4to (280 x 204 mm). 112 vintage black-and-white photographs (ca. 13 x 18 cm), frequently captioned in German in white ink, on 56 black paper leaves (plus two blank leaves at the end). Contemporary green card boards, block-bound with string.
€ 2,000.00
A fine album of excellent original travel photographs, assembled by a party of young men from Germany, Austria and Hungary travelling through Northern Africa in the late 1920s or very early 1930s. A total of 36 photos show scenes from Libya: the cave dwellings in the jebels, the Arab and especially Jewish population, a Bedouin tent, Italian officers in Aziziya, but also a group portrait of the travellers leaning on their motorcar. A few pictures show the European tourists laughingly taunting the local children with cigarettes for which they let the youngsters grapple. The strong focus on the fairly large Jewish community (then constituting nearly 4% of the Libyan population, as compared to less than 0.8% in Germany) is poignant before the background of the increasingly virulent antisemitism in the visitors' central European homeland, apparently revealing a particular fascination with the "otherness" of the Jews who are here shown and described as a people living as they supposedly did in Biblical times.
Via Malta (6 photos, some depicting warships in the harbour) the party sailed on to Tunis, where no fewer than 32 photographs cover the port, the Al-Zaytuna Mosque, Spahis and French officers on horseback, and a wealth of street scenes: the old town with its souks, Bab Souika square, gypsies, veiled women, water salesmen, men in coffee houses, and a Christian butchery. The remainder of the album shows scenes from the return journey through Italy: Cagliari and Sardinia (6), Civitavecchia (3), Livorno (5), Genoa (1), and Milan (23, including many from the Cimitero Monumentale and some showing off then-modern architecture).
A well-preserved ensemble of amateur travel photographs from a region more frequently captured in military photography but rarely visited at the time by affluent European tourists with high-quality cameras.
