Anyone who read his books, from Secret Tibet to Meeting with Japan and Case, Amori, Universi – his amazing autobiography – and many more, should not miss “L’immagine dell’empresente, una retrospettiva” (The image of empresent, a retrospective) , the exhibition that Francesco Paolo Campione designed and coordinated at MUSEC in Lugano (June 8, 2024 – January 19, 2025) to celebrate Fosco Maraini twenty years after his death.
Over 200 photographs, divided into 15 sections, illustrate Fosco Maraini’s professional and personal adventure spanning more than 60 years, but what I hope you will visit is not just a stunning selection of snapshots he took in the course of his countless travels and of his research, it is also the portrait of a man who made empathy the cornerstone of his life. In the surreal Tibetan landscape, among the Kafirs of Pakistan, with the Ainu of Hokkaido and among the Japanese fisherwomen of Hekura island, Maraini gets to the heart of those peoples and overcomes his “otherness” as only great photographers can do. The eye framing the scene, the finger immortalizing it with a click, are those of a multifaceted man, photographer for sure, but also sportsman, anthropologist, ethnologist, writer, scholar, aesthete. However, these qualities would have been mere intellectual gifts had they not been permeated by a profound humanity and an innate joie de vivre that sparkled in his eyes and which you will find in many of his photographs.
For this review I have chosen from the many photos in three sections devoted to Asia, but you will find many others with different themes in the exhibition.

Renzo Freschi

SECRET TIBET
During the New Year’s Eve 1937 spent in the Dolomites, Maraini fatally learned from a crumpled newspaper blurb that the famous Orientalist Giuseppe Tucci ( 1894-1984) was about to leave for his sixth expedition to Asia. Without being under any illusions, Maraini wrote to the scholar proposing to accompany him as a photographer. Returning to Florence, he found waiting for him a letter in which he was summoned to Rome…to discuss the trip. In contact with Tucci, the months spent in India, Sikkim and Tibet in the summer of that year were a real crash course in Tibetan civilization for Maraini. All around, a Himalayan world that was “excessive, gigantic, titanic and satanic together” contrasted openly with the good-natured and extroverted nature and ancient fragility of the humanity that populated it. Women, men, children, merchants, bureaucrats and masked thespians who, in the luminous spaces of the highlands, acted as a counterbalance, not only visual, to the somber and secretive atmospheres of the religious buildings, to the vivid chromaticisms of an art without voids and to a timeless monastic life. In 1948, the war over, Maraini returned a second time to Tibet, again with Tucci. While the new trip was rich in events and meetings, which allowed him to deepen his knowledge of the local culture, photographically the magic of eleven years earlier was only partially repeated. Political instability and social crisis, which would cause the tragic Chinese invasion in 1950, were rapidly leading that world to its inevitable end.

THE AINU FROM HOKKAIDO
Intolerant of the Italian political atmosphere, a month and a half after the promulgation of fascist racial laws, Maraini took advantage of a substantial scholarship provided by a Japanese government agency to move with her family to the island of Hokkaido. In early 1939, settling in Sapporo, in one of the houses the university allocated to foreigners, he began a research program that, led him to spend long periods of observation in the field. The main object of his studies was the art and religion of the Ainu, the people of Siberian origin who constituted the oldest ethnic group in Japan and still kept alive some of their customs. The Ainu ascribed to fierce animals an immortal soul. The bear, in particular, was revered as the supreme deity of nature. The ceremony in which the soul of a sacrificed bear was sent to the celestial abodes, the iyomancer, constituted one of the fulcrums of the ideological system and a precious key to understanding their culture. It was during these years that Maraini developed the conviction that art photography, interacting with the narrative text, was a language capable of communicating the profound contents of ethnographic research. In the following years the Ainu remained one of the main subjects of his attention and research. New trips and reportages were made in 1953, 1954 and 1971, cementing the friendship with a people who today read Maraini’s writings to revitalize their own identity.

PAROPAMISO, THE LAST PAGANS
In 1959 Maraini led the mountaineering expedition of the Rome section of the Italian Alpine Club, which had as its destination the unclimbed Saraghar Peak (7349 m), in theHindu Kush chain, not far from the borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The expedition was successful and the summit was reached on 25 August.
On the way back, Maraini and his companions entered some Alpine valleys on the left of the upper course of the Kunar river, inhabited by an ancient population that remained refractory to the Islamization suffered by the neighboring regions. Called by their Muslim neighbors by the name of kafir, or “infidels”, the Kalash belonged to a native culture that nineteenth-century legends, due to their physical characteristics (amber skin, light hair and blue eyes), had associated with the Macedonian descendants of the soldiers of Alexander the Great.
Perched in almost inaccessible places, the Kalash led a simple and joyful lifestyle in great harmony with their surroundings. Their shamanic religion was reminiscent of an ancestral paganism which contemplated the adoration of fire and the presence of benign and malignant creatures to be ingratiated with prayers, dances and sacrifices of all kinds. The special relationship with the ancestors was highlighted by the presence of a quantity of large wooden sculptures carved in a “barbaric” way, fixed in their place at the end of appropriate ceremonies.
An unexpected archaic scenario that Maraini’s camera immortalized for future memory with suggestive shots, in essential features, still admirably recognizable today.

THE FISHERMEN OF HEKURA
In July 1954, Maraini decided to make a documentary and a photo shoot on the Ama, an ancient people who fascinated him for the “Gauguin-style” visual suggestions that they brought to mind. After an initial reconnaissance, Maraini headed towards Hekura Island and the Seven Islands archipelago, north of the Noto peninsula, in the Sea of ​​Japan, where he resided for two months, with the help of Murata production cameraman Takahaashi and friend Rosie Talamonti (1922-2001).
Distributed along the central and southern coast of Japan, the Ama lived in small villages by the sea, still retaining some traits of their original culture. Among these was the fishing of a particular mollusk, the awabi, which was the pre-eminent occupation of the summer months and the main source of income for the community. Awabi fishing was a task reserved for women who practiced it freediving along the seabed facing the island, in some cases even twenty meters deep.
Since there was no equipment for underwater filming in Japan at the time, Maraini designed and had a diving suit for the movie camera and one for the camera built on site.
In that famous reportage, with his sunny and sporting vision, Maraini was able to combine the charm of the women of Hekura with the narration in snapshots of an everyday life marked by the profound relationship between culture and the environment. An almost unknown Japan, which his lens managed to immortalize still in a vital phase, while on the horizon the autumn of a world destined, shortly thereafter, to disappear forever could already be glimpsed.