Exiled in Bombay, the former Ullstein business editor and Berliner Zeitung am Mittag’s deputy editor-in-chief Ernst Schaeffer was forced to diversify his journalistic activities to generate income. He became an English and German tour and travel guide for Thomas Cook, translated German film scripts to English for Bhavnani film studios, gave educational talks on All India Radio, and, as a self-taught photographer, started his “Individual Photo Studio” (Shaffer 1971, 48) in his Colaba living room, specializing in portrait photography.

The autodidact Schaeffer “threw himself into the specialist literature and began to work systematically with the camera.” (Shaffer 1971, 45f.) After some practice he learned to work with large format cameras and familiarized himself with a wide range of lenses and lights. By February 1936 he had developed his photographic skills to the point of being able to hold an exhibition: In collaboration with the Afga Photo Company headed by Albrecht von Leyden, he presented his photos in a Rolleiflex Exhibition in the Taj Mahal Hotel (The Times of India, 6 February 1936, 1), demonstrating “[t]he value of the small camera for taking pictures.” (The Times of India, 6 February 1936, 16). The success of the exhibition might have germinated the idea of publishing the photographic travel guide Pictorial Bombay and supported his search for a publishing house, which he found in the New Book Co. Pvt. Ltd. in the Kitab Mahal, owned by the Taraporevala family. Pictorial Bombay is an unusual example of a guidebook written from an exilic perspective, offering insights into both how Schaeffer grasped the colonial city and how he contributed to developing Bombay as a tourist destination by exploring it through walking and street-level-photography.

Continuing to draw on his international network, Schaeffer combined journalism with photography to establish himself internationally as a photojournalist. With the support of his former Ullstein colleagues, in Bombay Schaeffer received assignments for the New York City-based Black Star photo agency and Life magazine. His networks in India – including members of Indian and British Indian political and economic elites, leaders of the Indian independence movement, Indian royal families and members of Bombay’s avant-garde art circles like Mulk Raj Anand and Anil de Silva and Walter Kaufmann – enabled him to present English-speaking, international audiences with images from India that they were unlikely to have seen before, like the photos of  a Maharaja’s wedding in Bhopal that were published in Life magazine in June 1939. Locally he engaged himself in Bombay’s Jewish exile and relief networks, and became a founding member of the Jewish Relief Association.

For his journalistic work Schaeffer travelled widely in India. In Bhavnagar in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat he applied his self-taught photographic skills to document the renovation and expansion of the Nilambagh Place by his German architect friend Philipp Kanoffsky (born 1886). His anecdote about Kanoffsky coming to Baroda and later to Bhavnagar (Shaffer 1971, p. 35ff) together with many more stories are collected in his autobiographical account Ein Emigrant entdeckt Indien [An Emigrant Discovers India] from 1971.

The Second World War interrupted transcontinental transport, communication and the import of photography supplies. Tourism vanished, as did Schaeffer’s other sources of income. Having just received British citizenship, career-wise Schaeffer survived as a print production manager for an American advertisement company for the next three and a half years. In October 1943 Ernst Schaeffer became the assistant manager of Oxford University Press, eventually working there for twelve years before returning to freelance journalism. Schaeffer’s connection to India remained long after he left the subcontinent in the early 1960s for Germany; he contributed, for example, to setting up the Südasien (South Asia) department of Deutsche Welle (see Shaffer 1971).