The exhibition at Palazzo Bertalazone in Turin is divided into three sections and presents three reportages by MUSEC: The Enchantment of the Women of the Sea. The Ama of Hekura in the work of Fosco Maraini; The Island of the Gods. Bali in the work of Gotthard Schuh and India at the Time of Gandhi. Photographs by Walter Bosshard.

The awabi women fishermen immortalised by Maraini in the waters off Japan probably represent the first underwater ethnographic reportage and bear witness to a still unknown and fascinating place, vibrant with vitality and eroticism in the eyes of a European, while the decline of a world destined, shortly afterwards, to disappear was already foreshadowed on the horizon.

The same sensuality and carefreeness shine through in the images with which Gotthard Schuh captures Balinese life seemingly punctuated only by the cycles of nature and religious festivities. An atmosphere, on closer inspection, at the antipodes to the greyness and closure of Europe as it inexorably entered the mournful period of World War II.

A similar state of suspension, albeit for different stylistic and moral reasons, is what the images of Bosshard’s reportage in India in 1930 give us. Bosshard aims at not wanting to pass judgement, and not wanting to influence the observer, and so he portrays Gandhi in his private life with that very simple, but no less authoritative, hieraticism that will become one of the stereotypes of the Mahatma’s public iconography from then on.