"Featured Comment by Chris Lucianu: "'You can't use that, it's not professional' are almost the very words Ella Maillart told me she heard from her editors when she proposed to travel to Central Asia and China with her Leica in the 1930s.
"You may want to look up Ella Maillart: adventurer, travel writer, photographer. Her first major tribulations took her across the Soviet Union through to Soviet Turkestan, 1930–32. On her way back, she stopped over in Germany, where she was met by Ernst Leitz II. Leitz was so impressed with her photographs that he presented her, literally, with her first Leica. (Her last would be a CL, forty years later.) Ella went back to Central Asia, and was joined for a trek all across China and the Himalayas, from Beijing to Srinagar, by Peter Fleming (Ian Fleming's elder and arguably more interesting brother). Both she and Fleming published their individual accounts of that journey.
"I met Ella Maillart half a century after her first Asian adventures. A spry, ageless Kate Hepburn character, she was preparing a trek to Bhutan and Sikkim. I took her picture with my OM-1. She examined the Olympus, weighed it carefully in her hands, and said: 'Not too bad for an SLR. Still, the lenses are bulkier than my Leica. You can't travel light enough up there.' I joked that she should consider a Minox. 'I thought about that, but was warned that I might get arrested as a spy. Even my Leica was so unusually small at the time, it was held against me as a "concealed camera" when I was arrested in turn by the Russians, the Japanese and the Chinese, during my travels in the '30s. Eventually they let me go, and keep my camera, because I was clearly an "amateur."' At that, she beamed me a broad smile."