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Gotthard Schuh and the islands of the gods
Annabelle Lacour (2014/ 2025)
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| #AL 1-01: Gotthard Schuh Mother and child, Bali 1938 |
On the eve of the Second World War, Gotthard Schuh (1897–1969), a Swiss photojournalist working for the magazine Zurcher Illustrierte, embarked on a personal voyage of eleven months in the Dutch East Indies from 1938 to 1939.
The journey was an opportunity for Schuh to experiment artistically with his own photographic style, which may be described as ‘poetic realism’. He was one of the last of a long line of European and American photographers, artist, filmmakers, writers and anthropologists since the 1920s to seek out the ‘lost paradise’ of Bali, where art and life were one and people lived in harmony.
Schuh’s journey should be seen primarily as an existential and cultural break for a European artist who was witnessing his own world decay. After returning from his journey, he published Inseln der gotter (Islands of gods) in 1941.
The book included 231 images in fine photogravure and was reprinted in 1943 and revised in 1954 in French, German and Dutch editions. Like earlier publications such as those of Gregor Krause in the early 1920s, it reinforced the image of the Balinese people as much as Bali the place, and inspired others including the French photojournalist Henri Cartier‑Bresson to make his own journey to the Dutch East Indies in 1949 and publish one of his first books, Les danses Bali in 1954.
Zurcher Illustrierte published Schuh’s Bali images but in a way that conformed to the idea of the ‘lost paradise’ that cultivated the arts. Schuh’s book, although following conventional emphasis on traditional life, conveys a more complex vision resulting from a successful mixture of reportage and self-observation and a special care for human figure.
The book was a personal expression in which he experimented with unexpected vantage points, a peculiar attention to textures and playful printing techniques to engender a fresh rapport with the visible world. The text, which he wrote himself, is simple, diaristic and integrated with the pictures—the layout was done in collaboration with graphic designer Heiri Steiner.
The impact the book made when it was first published was perhaps due to his first person narrative and the combination of image and text in which the reader felt a sense of placement in the scene, with the photographer and the Indonesian people.
It was a style of book rarely done, or successfully achieved, prior to Inseln der gotter. The image was no longer a mere illustration.
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