"Yallah": Photographs by Peter W. Haeberlin, March 1-[March] 1958

Peter W. Haeberlin was a Swiss photographer noted for his picture series made on treks across Saharan Africa between 1949 and 1952. He was born May 25, 1912 in Kreuzlingen near Konstanz on Lake Constance and grew up in Singen, Germany, just across the Swiss border. From 1928-1931 he took up an apprenticeship with a pastry chef in Berneck, Switzerland. At 21 years old he set out from his home in Canton Thurgau to walk to Africa and from 1932 to 1934 journeyed on foot from Switzerland to Italy stopping at Capri and Positano, before proceeding on to Palermo, where he embarked on a ship to Tunisia and Algeria where he saw the desert and stopped at the oasis of Biskra before heading farther south to the city of Touggourt. In Constantine, Algeria, he worked in the famous Pâtisserie Viennoise to restore his travel funds. He returned via Morocco and Gibraltar and subsequently made other trips in Europe during which, in 1935 in Stockholm, he attempted to meet the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, who was known for his explorations of Asia, also in large desert areas, reported in his books published since the nineteenth century that Haeberlin read avidly.

From 1938 to 1939 Haeberlin studied sculpture and photography at the Hansische Hochschule, Hamburg until World War II forced him out of Germany. He then enrolled in photography at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich from 1940 to 1943 where he studied under Hans Finsler. After graduation, his work was published in Atlantis and Du. In 1948 he married Jolita Coughlin, an American student. He then undertook four extensive tours of North Africa over 1949-1952, often retracing his previous journeys, on the established caravan routes, on foot, by bicycle and on transport, crossing the Sahara desert until he reached North Cameroon. He photographed the people and architecture in locations including Béchar, northern Algeria, in El Golea, central-northern Algeria, in a Tuareg camp near the Hoggar mountains, Mali, Salah, central Algeria, northern Sahara, and Ghardaia cemetery, northern Algeria. His frank, full-face photograph of a young woman with braided hair and decorative cicatrices on her cheeks and nose, taken in bright desert sunlight, is typical of his work in Northern Africa. It was selected by curator Edward Steichen for the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man, which came to the Legion of Honor in 1957. Shortly after returning from his last trip, he died in an accident in Zürich on July 9, 1953. Some of his photographs were published posthumously in 1956 in the book “Yallah,” completed by Haeberlin’s father with the help of the American author Paul Bowles and with a foreword by Bowles who in 1933 also trekked through the Algerian Sahara to Tunisia. The New Yorker in a 1957 review reported that it was the work “of one of the great photographers of our times, capable of showing, as only art can, what would otherwise have remained hidden”, and other reviewers discern a poetic dimension to pictures that in other contexts would be documentary. Without the book, Häberlin would likely have remained unknown.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Werner_H%C3%A4berlin