”The most wonderful summer of my life”: Walter Bosshard’s journeys in Inner Mongolia

Special Issue: Travelling to the Heart of Asia: A History of Western Encounters with Mongolia:
This paper focuses on the Mongolian journeys of one of the most important representatives of modern photo-journalism, the Swiss journalist and author Walter Bosshard (1892–1975). From 1934 to 1936 he undertook five journeys in Inner Mongolia from which he brought back roughly 2,000 photos, of which only 131 have been published in his travel report Kühles Grassland Mongolei (“Fresh grasslands of Mongolia”) of 1938. The book gained wide popularity among Swiss and German readers and some of its photographs have achieved iconic status in modern ethnographic photography. The paper provides a description of Bosshard’s Mongolian journeys and introduces his travel report, analysing the discursive modes of his representation of the Mongolians.