The year 1962 marked my apogee as a fashion photographer: I had photographed the haute couture collections in Rome and Paris for the prestigious Harper's Bazaar. (The magazine is still going and so are the fashion shows, but today few photographers would consider these the high point of their career…)

At the time, it meant I had climbed as far as I could on that particular path and I had to find a new one.

Luck came to my aid. I was called up by a certain Herr Schumacher from the German magazine Revue. He wished to assign me a series of photo stories on "the great cities outside Europe": those were the days when the world had not yet turned into a "global village" and one could still believe that the public was interested in far-off countries.

I met him in his office in Munich where he introduced me to Dieter Lattmann, a young novelist who was to accompany me and write the texts, and who was all the more likely to marvel at the world as he had never set foot outside his native Germany.

It was a dream assignment: eight months' travel, with the freedom to photograph whichever way I wanted so long as I produced 12 photographic reports on 12 very different cities: rather like that game where you join all the dots with a line which ends by revealing a new shape. Similarly, the complete series was meant to yield a kind of portrait of the world-or, at any rate, of the world outside Europe.

Our first stumbling block came because of the Cold War and various local hot wars as a result of which Revue was unable to obtain visas for China, Cuba, South Africa and Nigeria. As for the countries that remained accessible -happily there were still a great many of them-the fact of being limited to 12 photo stories forced us to choose between Cairo and Baghdad, Calcutta and Bombay, Sydney and Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore, and also between different capitals of Latin America and Africa. Nevertheless I insisted on the inclusion of the two biggest cities of the United States, New York and Los Angeles, whose contrasting and complementary aspects seemed to be necessary to the whole.

Inevitably, such an itinerary left many gaps. Yet I felt I would capture 12 very different photo stories especially as I was not planning to undertake exhaustive investigations in the manner of National Geographic, but rather sketches of every stopover which would show the most conspicuous characteristics of each place (even if that meant caricaturing them to some extent).

Herr Schumacher struck me as an ideal client since not only did he agree with all my suggestions regarding the itinerary, but he also consented to view my work after the whole series was finished and I had made a first selection from amongst my prints.

The period between November 1962 and June 1963 was without doubt one of the most intense and fully occupied of my life. My relationship with Dieter Lattman remained formal but friendly.
We took the same planes and stayed in the same hotels, each working in his own way and in fact making two very different journeys: his germanic reactions were so far removed from my rather more cosmopolitan point of view that I decided to keep my own journal in case my photographic reports were ever published outside Germany.

I spent the summer of 1963 editing the contact sheets and getting my photographs printed whilst Dieter Lattman finished off revising his text. We made an appointment with the Herr Chef-Redaktor in October and, one fine morning, we found ourselves in Munich in the Revue waiting room with our hearts thumping and our cases full of photos, documents and expense statements.

When we introduced ourselves to the receptionist, explaining that Herr Schumacher was expecting us, she stared back at us in astonishment. Then she disappeared for a few minutes and returned to tell us that Herr Schumacher-whom she did not have the pleasure of knowing personally -had left the paper more than six months previously. But Herr X, the current editor-in-chief, would be happy to see us.

Herr X received us half an hour later and seemed very embarrassed. He confirmed that Schumacher had effectively been sacked from the paper, his management having proved disastrous for the publisher. Herr X was now trying to repair the damage by guiding the magazine towards areas more appealing to the wider public such as the private life of starlets and colour pictures of female anatomy. Unfortunately Schumacher had not told him about our project. In any case, our reports-the excellence of which he did not question-could not find the space earmarked by his predecessor in the magazine such as he now ran it.

Our only consolation was that, in the climate of the German "economic miracle", the publishers could allow themselves the luxury of sticking to their promises: our fees and expenses were repaid in full, and our 12 reports published albeit with many cuts and only in the last pages of the magazine. On the other hand, I was allowed to sell my photographs with my own text to publications in other countries, just as Dieter Lattman on his side kept the right to publish his travel journal as a book.

In the course of the 40 years which followed, I have presented some of these photos in several exhibitions and books, as well as on my website. However, most of them have slumbered in my archive: in a time when any old age pensioner can take a charter plane to visit the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall of China, a photographer's round the world tour is no longer the stuff of dreams.

It was while sorting my papers and re-reading my old text that I was drawn to see this work in a new light. Rather like in Borgès' celebrated short story, I found myself face to face with the young man I had been and, at the same time, I compared the actual world with the one-so different and yet so similar -at the time of the journey. Since then, the cities on my itinerary have grown three or four times larger and more populous; contraception, globalisation, computers, AIDS and terrorism have wrought the changes with which we are familiar. Nevertheless I find my sometimes naïve and overly casual observations and prognostications confirmed by what I see around me now.

It is a little as though a voyage in space had become a journey through time and it is from this point of view that it may be of some interest to the visitors of this website.