On Tumblr, @pwlanier’s been posting things sold by the National Geographic Society at Christie’s in 2012.
One image that stood out to me was Maynard Owens Williams’ 1931 photo of the Great Buddha at Bamian, one of two monumental sculptures created in the 5th-6th centuries in what is now central Afghanistan.
It stood out because I found myself talking about the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamian Buddhas in 2001 in my Rabkin Foundation interview a while back. Which was not something I’d planned or anticipated, tbqh; that fragment had just been lying there in my head, I guess, and I picked it up.
TIL M.O. Williams was the Society’s first field correspondent. He photographed the Buddhas [and this other scene, from Herat in western Afghanistan] on the Citroën-Haardt Expedition, a 7,000-mile trans-Asiatic road trip by motor car, tractor, pony, camel, and yak between Beirut and Beijing. [At the time, the project was known by the more racist title, la Croisière Jaune, the Yellow Expedition.] And French philosopher, Jesuit—and sinopaleontologist??—Pierre Tielhard de Chardin was on the trip, too. Who knew?