Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China then Japan: six countries crossed and photographed by Marc Riboud between 1955 and 1958.
To the East, a box of five books, a veritable notebook of visual notes, brings together the most beautiful photographs taken during this long and slow journey undertaken to initially reach Calcutta. Eager to discover these thousand-year-old civilizations, he first stops in Istanbul, before continuing on his way through the admirable landscapes of Cappadocia and Anatolia. He crosses Persia to reach Afghanistan and its tribal areas, as Nicolas Bouvier had done shortly before him. In 1956, he arrived in India, where he traveled for almost a year. It is from there that he enters Communist China. He ended his "Grand Tour" in Japan in 1958, then in full reconstruction after the war and in full societal change. Back in France, Marc Riboud brings back thousands of photographs, traces of these ancestral cultures.