Three years after escaping from Nazi Germany and docking at Bombay’s shores, Ernst Schaeffer (1892–1978) published his travel guide Pictorial Bombay: an album with 40 full-page black and white photographs and an accompanying independent text of a similar number of pages. Nine small black and white photos complete the book.

The first and leading bookstore and publisher in Bombay, the New Book Co. Pvt. Ltd. in the Kitab Mahal, owned by the Taraporevala family, printed Pictorial Bombay in time for pre-Christmas sale in 1936. In 1936 the bookstore was located at 210 Hornby Road, with a branch in the Taj Mahal Hotel at Apollo Bunder to serve an elite Indian and high-class foreign clientele.

Perhaps Schaeffer chose the cover image of Pictorial Bombay to appeal to I.H. Taunton, who endorsed the publication in his foreword. As the municipal commissioner, Taunton directed the work of the Municipal Corporation and worked in the building. In his foreword Taunton highlighted the “unusual viewpoint[s]” from which Schaeffer took his photographs. His colonial stamp of approval likely added to Pictorial Bombay’s appeal to the English-speaking civic elite. While Schaeffer may have been committed to communicating Bombay’s everyday urban life, he was also aware of his potential market, aiming to please them without compromising his artistic vision.

Schaeffer’s exile experience as a mediator (see Reiter 2006) made it possible to create Pictorial Bombay as a kind of hybrid publication, in both form and content. It is a guidebook without maps or timetables; an artbook with restaurant recommendations and insider tips; a coffee table book with tour routes, excursions and a programme of evening entertainment. Its portrayal of the city includes photos from unusual angles, anecdotes and journalistic texts from the perspective of a stranger. In the guidebook, Schaeffer leaves the beaten path of 1930s sightseeing in Bombay and takes the position of a curious explorer on foot. He studied the urban logic of Bombay with his lenses, shifting his gaze away from the colonial monuments and buildings towards the people of Bombay.

Using a modern, light Rolleiflex camera he was able to move and work quickly while engaging in the city’s everyday life; he dissolved the distance between the subject and the viewer by locating the viewer at street level. His photographic encounters are shaped by his curiosity as a photojournalist and his enthusiasm as a new Bombayite to document his surroundings. With his words he addresses his readers personally and takes them along on a virtual “stroll around the town” creating a group feeling, a togetherness, a sense of ‘we’.

Schaeffer’s in-between status and his interest in the local urban landscape, the inhabitants of Bombay, the surrounding districts with their rice-fields, beaches, coconut plantations and farms, enabled him to create this unique guidebook. He mediates between the different classes of Bombay, creating virtual access to the Taj Mahal Hotel as well as to the Willingdon Club, a sugar-cane vendor at Null Bazar, smokers in the Jogeshwari Caves and sailors at their small boats. Schaeffer’s premier interest in the people of Bombay draws his attention away from the monuments, and towards the city’s social life. With this self-generated knowledge of the by-lanes of Bombay and its inhabitants, he remaps Bombay as a tourist location. He recreates the social space of Bombay as a touristscape through text, photos and his individual perspective (see Franz/Lee 2022).