MILLI BAU. 5000 km to Paris

May 5 to October 27, 2024 A cooperation with the Weltkulturen Museum A partner project of RAY – Triennial of Photography 2024

In 1949, she was the only woman to take part in a three-year expedition to South America, and later traveled alone around the world in a converted VW bus. The reports and photographs of travel writer and photographer Emilia »Milli« Bau are an impressive testimony to an independent woman in Germany in the 1950s and beyond. She traveled to North Africa, Pakistan, India, China, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Iran, among other places. Starting in 1967, she lived in Tehran for seven years. Still at the age of 88, she crosses Siberia. She captured all these journeys in photographs with her Rolleiflex: a glimpse into a world that was unknown in the West and that no longer exists today.

»Then I will become a migratory bird, a home nowhere, a person who is unstable and fleeting on earth.«

Milli Bau

The exhibition at the TU Kunstforum and in the public space of Darmstadt and Frankfurt pays tribute for the first time on this scale to the work of the journalist and photographer Milli Bau (*1906 Darmstadt – †2005 ibid.). Her impressive photographs bear witness to the more than 40 journeys Bau undertook from 1948, later as head of the feature section of the Hamburg-based »Welt« newspaper. They are a sign of cosmopolitanism and cultural understanding – and an impressive testimony to an emancipated, intrepid and curious woman.

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