World Photography Day: around the world with car and camera

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Today is World Photography Day. Nowadays, we take photographs almost without thinking, but how grateful we should be to the photographers and filmmakers of the pioneering years. Thanks to them, we can still form a vivid picture of a world that would otherwise have been largely lost. So today, a heartfelt word of thanks to all photographers, past and present.

The accompanying photograph shows exactly why it is so important to capture remarkable moments. We see Aloha Wanderwell, once billed as ‘The World’s Most Widely Travelled Girl’. The photograph was taken in Hawaii in 1924. Her Ford Model T appears to have left the road and come to a halt in the undergrowth. Sadly, the photograph does not reveal how the adventure ended. We shall gladly leave that to your imagination.

Aloha Wanderwell was born Idris Galcia Hall in Canada in 1906. Her remarkable life story began when, at the age of sixteen, she read an advertisement placed by the self-styled Captain Walter Wanderwell. He was looking for a young woman to join his round-the-world expedition, someone who could serve, among other things, as a translator, driver and camerawoman. Idris applied and set out from Nice at the end of 1922 on the adventure of a lifetime.

The Wanderwell expedition travelled through dozens of countries in several Ford Model Ts. The cars were shipped from continent to continent before the journey continued overland. Between December 1922 and January 1927, Aloha, as she later called herself, became the first woman to drive around the world, an achievement officially recognised by Guinness World Records.

At least as important as the journey itself, however, were the images captured along the way. With their cameras, the Wanderwells recorded their experiences in Africa, China, Russia, Hawaii and elsewhere. The films were later shown at lectures and screenings around the world under the fitting title Car and Camera Around the World.

In the surviving footage, we see Aloha driving, filming, reading maps, removing stones from beneath the wheels and dancing with African communities. We also see how she fell in love with the leader of the expedition, whom she married in 1925 and with whom she had two children.

Without her cameras, these extraordinary adventures would have remained little more than stories. Thanks to photography, more than a century later, we can still travel alongside Aloha – even when her Model T ends up in the bushes somewhere in Hawaii.

Words: Laurens Klein, Photograph: Detroit Public Library

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