Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Albert Kahn’s Archives

The Color of MemoryAlbert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet

By the time of Albert Kahn’s death in 1940, the French banker and philanthropist had amassed a collection of more than 72,000 autochrome photographs. Grace Linden explores the Archives de la Planète — his sprawling, global project to document and preserve the fast-changing world — and uncovers a latent nostalgia in the hyperreal hues of early color photography.

Published

December 11, 2024

Dutch couple in traditional dress - woman wearing white cap and striped dress with apron, man in dark uniform with captain's hat standing together.

Autochrome of a fisherman and his wife in Volendam, the Netherlands, 1919 – Source.

In November 1911, the French banker Albert Kahn revealed his plans for an undertaking that was global in scale and utopian in its horizons: he aimed to document the whole of humanity, to “fix once and for all, the look, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is just a question of time.”1 To finance this extraordinary and ambitious project, Kahn himself would pay a team of photographers and filmmakers to crisscross the globe and document its practices, sites, and manifold ways of being. The resulting images and footage were to become the Archives de la Planète, a grand and grandiose homage to a changing world. By the time of Kahn’s death on November 14, 1940, only a few months into the occupation of France by Nazi Germany, his team had amassed more than a hundred hours of film and over 72,000 autochromes, a precursor to modern color photography.

Despite his embrace of these then-novel technologies, Kahn was a private man, and few images of him survive. He was born Abraham Kahn on March 3, 1860, in Marmoutier, a commune in the Bas-Rhin region not far from Germany. His father worked as a livestock merchant and Kahn was the eldest of six children; he would remain a childless bachelor throughout his life. Border zones can be precarious environments, and in 1871, following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War the year prior, Germany annexed Alsace-Moselle. In only a few short months, Kahn became Prussian through no choice of his own.

Like many in his community, Kahn joined the internal migration of Alsatian Jews who left their homes for more hospitable, and more French, regions. Around 1875, he arrived in Paris where, in one of his first acts, he changed his name to Albert. He was soon employed by Goudchaux bank and later studied for his baccalaureate under the philosopher Henri Bergson, relatively unknown at the time, who became his mentor and friend. Kahn would retrospectively be referred to as “Bergon’s first pupil”.2

Kahn’s work took him overseas to South Africa and Japan, and later, as his successes mounted (he became a joint owner of the bank at just thirty-two), seemingly everywhere. In 1895, he purchased property in Boulogne-Billancourt, at the time a suburb of Paris, which was to become the center of his endeavors and today houses the museum dedicated to his legacy. From there, Kahn oversaw several projects that spoke to his interest in the greater world, including the Autour du Monde travel scholarships; several foundations devoted to a range of study, from biology and geography to economics, politics, and sociology; and a weekly informal lunch featuring a variety of illustrious guests including Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Thomas Mann, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Man with long white beard wearing a light gray robe stands in a garden path surrounded by blooming pink lilac bushes and arching branches.

Autochrome of Rabindranath Tagore at Albert Kahn’s Boulogne-Billancourt property, 1921 – Source.

Winding stone pathway through Japanese garden leads to rustic thatched tea house, featuring golden maple trees, crimson Japanese maples, stone lantern, and layered evergreen plantings creating depth and seasonal color throughout the composition.

Autochrome of a tea house hidden by the greenery of the “Japanese village” at Albert Kahn’s Boulogne-Billancourt property, 1910 – Source.

The property was also home to a sprawling garden — which continued to grow as Kahn acquired abutting land — with sections devoted to different countries’ horticultural practices. In concert with Kahn, Achille Duchêne, the head gardener, cultivated a series of mini landscapes complete with, among others, an English section, a Japanese village, and la forêt vosgienne, an homage to the Alsatian region. Kahn’s “transnational” garden was, in some ways, a physical embodiment of the aims of his Archive: to showcase the best of multiple cultures side by side.

The seeds of the Archives de la Planète emerged during an around-the-world tour that Kahn undertook between November 1908 and May 1909. Combining business and cultural edification, the itinerary, which brought him to Asia and North America, was not so different from his previous travels. The notable change was that Kahn asked his chauffeur, Albert Dutertre, to document the journey in both film and stereograph photography, an early form of the three-dimensional picture.

Many of Dutertre’s images show the everyday features that define a place: crowds, buildings, people going about the quotidian and the ordinary. He photographed a woman walking down one of Manhattan’s wide avenues, firefighters gathering in Tokyo, the Shanghai harbor as Dutertre and Kahn pulled into dock. Kahn, who regarded tourism with suspicion and thus sought to avoid well-trodden paths, reveled in these scenes of “real” people leading “real” lives. His was a decidedly anti-touristic ethos, and he was attracted to the idea of capturing how people really live — and the places that they call home.

People in formal dress walking along sidewalk outside stone church or civic building, with women in long skirts and men wearing bowler hats and overcoats.

Stereograph of mass at New York City’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, 1908 – Source.

Park entrance with Japanese people in traditional dress and police officers in uniform displaying emblem on back, women carrying parasols near ornate lamp posts."

Stereograph of firefighters gathering for a review near Hibiya Park in Tokyo, 1909 – Source.

Although he benefited greatly from the era’s economic developments, Kahn was skeptical of progress. The annexation of the Alsace-Moselle region where he grew up likely taught him how quickly things could (and did) change. Perhaps from that experience, he developed what was an inherently nostalgic outlook. To Kahn, industrialization represented an existential threat and one poised to destroy the cultural and environmental heritage he so valued. Instead of optimism, he viewed the future with resignation. Unable to stop time’s relentless advance, he did the only thing he thought possible to save this inheritance: record on film the world as it was.

Kahn’s nostalgia was mirrored more widely in France, where technological advancements were rapidly altering the landscapes of the nineteenth century. Such transformations were far from subtle. The results of Baron Haussmann’s grand project in Paris were unambiguous, with more than eighty miles of new streets and boulevards cutting through the capital. Cathedral-like factories sprouted along the Seine. Railway networks expanded, and travel, once a pursuit only available to the wealthy, became more accessible. The depressed moral state of the French following the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War leant itself to a nostalgic gaze. Artists, both avant-garde and academic, celebrated the pastoral beauty of “la belle France”. The first law to protect and conserve historical monuments was passed in 1887. And even though the 1900 Exposition Universelle boasted displays of technological wonder, Albert Robida’s Le Vieux Paris, a model city glorifying France’s architectural history, would prove to be one of the Fair’s most successful attractions.3

In the midst of these huge societal shifts, and the nostalgia they evoked, came photography — a technology so apt at capturing and fixing time. The past no longer was simply past but now arrested forever in black and white. Color film would only make this feeling all the more powerful.

The nineteenth century was the century of color, during which new synthetic pigments expanded the landscape of chromatic representation. Historically, color had been laborious to produce, and so-called natural pigments were limited in range and often expensive to harvest. Consider Tyrian purple, the dark reddish-purple hue extracted from the secretions of sea snails in Lebanon, or ultramarine, which came from lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan. Accordingly, the advent of synthetic dyes during the mid-nineteenth century radically increased the availability and application of color. No longer was it purely for the wealthy and the elite alone. Instead, a range of synthetic pigments could be used to dye the fabrics sold at the new department stores, or to illustrate Impressionist canvases and posters. Consequently, color became associated with modernity, as art historian Laura Kalba argues, and no machine was more wholly tied to the modern world than the camera.4

Two Parisian scenes - street workers near wall plastered with vibrant performance and retail posters amid construction debris, paired with view of iconic Moulin Rouge music hall featuring red windmill tower, crescent moon, and numerous show advertisements lining entrance.

Two autochromes captured in Paris in 1914. Left, the Rue Boutebrie; right, the Boulevard de Clichy – Source: left, right.

Two views of same scene showing young woman resting chin on hand while seated at window with ornate lace valance and curtains, surrounded by milk canisters and metal jugs, wearing different colored jackets but same contemplative expression.

Two autochromes captured in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1912 – Source: left, right.

Group of young boys wearing colored loincloths standing in formation with hands raised to shade their eyes from sun, supervised by figure in black clothing, with tropical landscape and palm trees behind them in outdoor setting.

Autochrome of wrestlers from Indochina saluting the village “Génie” in Ha-Dong province, Tonkin, 1915 – Source.

Experiments concerning the possibility of color production in photography began almost as soon as Louis Daguerre demonstrated his photographic apparatus to the Académie des Sciences on January 7, 1839. Initially, hand coloring was the easiest method to produce color images. Over the course of the nineteenth century, more technical solutions were found, including Louis Ducos du Hauron’s color filters and Dr. John Joly’s multicolored glass screens. But these processes were complex and costly, and the resulting images were not particularly durable.

In 1903, more than six decades after the advent of the daguerreotype, Auguste and Louis Lumière unveiled the autochrome, the first truly serviceable and commercially available color photograph. Known for the Cinématographe, an early and popular film projector, the Lumière brothers marshaled their company’s existing infrastructure to experiment with the possibility of color images. Even so, it took around four years to perfect the technology, and commercial production did not begin until 1907.

To create an autochrome, a unique, glass plate negative — covered in grains of potato starch dyed red, green, and blue — would be inserted into the camera so that light could pass through the colored coating. This plate would then be developed, inverting the areas of dark and light to produce a positive transparency. Unlike later photographs, which can be printed and passed around, an autochrome must be viewed using illumination from behind. Light passes through the many thousands of grains and combines to create a fully colored image.

Pink and purple rippled clouds stretch across dawn sky over dark silhouettes of palm trees and buildings near water's edge.

Autochrome of sunset over West Lake (“Le Grand Lac”) in Hanoi, Tonkin, Indochina, 1915 – Source.

Detailed view of calligraphy in progress showing two hands at work - right hand carefully controlling a brush over paper, left hand stabilizing the document, both hands emerging from dark sleeves.

Autochrome of “the hands of a scholar” in Tonkin, Indochina, 1915 – Source.

Autochromes had several drawbacks. The cameras themselves were bulky and the glass plates heavy and fragile. Like their antecedents, they required long exposure times, which meant that any movement would easily blur the image. Many of the Archive’s autochromes, therefore, were taken of buildings, monuments, and geographical features. When people appear, they are often posed. Candids and snapshots — life, that is, being lived in real time — were not a possibility.

But despite these difficulties, photographers, both amateur and professional, embraced the autochrome in the hope of more truthfully registering the world they knew. In The Complete Photographer, first published in 1908, Roger Child Bayley wrote that the invention of the autochrome represented a chromatic revolution. If, according to Bayley, earlier processes were “gaudy-colored”, autochromes instead created “immense possibilities” for photographers.5 He applauded the “vividness of their colouring”, observing that “except for instantaneous work, there seems to be nothing that the ordinary camera can deal with in monochrome that the ‘Autochrome’ cannot render in color.”6

Left image shows three women in Greek folk costume with embroidered vests, layered skirts and ornate headdresses. Right image shows two people in flowing Moroccan robes of orange and pink with decorative belts.

Left: autochrome of women on Corfu, Greece, 1913; right: autochrome of two women from a douar in Sidi Kacem, Morocco, 1913 – Source: left, right.

It seems that Kahn understood the potential that such “vividness” offered, and he likely became aware of the autochrome early on, for he had attended presentations given by the explorer-photographer Jules Gervais-Courtellemont. Titled “Visions d’Orient”, these conferences commenced in the winter of 1908 and featured lantern-lit images that chronicled Gervais-Courtellemont’s voyage around the Middle East. The spectacle enchanted Kahn — he even invited his friend Auguste Rodin to accompany him — and several of Gervais-Courtellemont’s autochromes were to be among the first recorded entries in the Archives de la Planète. Color, as such, was essential to the Archive’s establishment. We do not inhabit a black and white world, but one composed of violet, rust red, creamy yellow, and dark green, a palette of worldly tones which the autochrome works to capture. For Khan, color could help him evoke places and people all the more effectively, a fidelity that was so vital to his archival task.

While color was a central component in Khan’s mission to archive the disappearing world, the particular chromatic landscape produced by autochrome technology seemed to further enhance the nostalgia inherent to his project. The hues of autochromes always feel more real than reality. The blues are bluer, the reds brighter, what is faded is even more subdued. At times, the colors recorded by Kahn’s team are heady and opulent. Piles of yellow watermelons glow electric in Auguste Léon’s 1913 image of a Corfu market. Or, dressed as a Geisha, the actress-dancer Matsumoto Tome holds a fan with a vivid orange stripe. Elsewhere, the images are more muted. A column of trees in Paghman, Afghanistan, is already sun bleached. Gathering Druze in Damascus look as if they were pasted into the scene. Regardless of their intensity, the colors feel unnatural, like they exist at a remove — which they do.

Men gather under arched colonnade of Mediterranean building with large display of stacked yellow melons in courtyard, street lamp mounted on wall.

Autochrome of a watermelon market on Corfu, Greece, 1913 – Source.

Left image shows Japanese woman in formal kimono with ornate obi sash and decorative fan against wooden interior, paired with Mongolian prisoner wearing wooden neck restraint board, traditional hat with long braid, and loose-fitting clothes.

Left: autochrome of the actress Matsumoto Tome dressed as a geisha in Kyoto, Japan, 1912; right: autochrome of a condemned man, perhaps a soldier, punished by cangue in Urga (Ulaanbaatar), Mongolia, 1913 – Source: left, right.

This chromatic disorientation allows for a gap to emerge between viewer and image. In so many of the autochromes, everything appears to have been summoned from a dream, and one with a decidedly imperialist bent. In part, this was due to the subject matter of certain films and photographs (laborers cutting plants at Angkor Thom, a montage of Kurdish men and women going about their daily activities, a mother nursing a baby in Dahomey) as well as the beliefs of various contributors to the Archive. More broadly, however, within late-nineteenth century France, geography, the discipline that undergirds Kahn’s entire project, was inextricably tied to nationalism, power, and conquest.7 Kahn’s decision to hire Jean Brunhes — an experienced traveler who used photography in his research and who, more significantly, pioneered the field of “human geography” — reveals the tone of Kahn’s academic aims.8 The Archive’s quest for a unifying narrative was one that “operated in the colonial tradition of the adventurer-geographer’s mission to map and conquer the infinite variety of the world”, writes Paula Amad.9 Photography only furthered this mission, since, in many ways, all photography is propaganda. Cameras collect data, but they are selective in what they choose to exhibit or ignore. Photographs always privilege one view, one narrative over another.

This sense of academic and colonial detachment shows up in the portraits of human subjects. By virtue of the autochrome’s limitations, these compositions are often artificial and stiff, since any movement would make faces and bodies appear uncanny and wraithlike. In these images, whose scientific impartiality can seem without empathy, photographic subjects are often framed centrally, in the same manner as a monument or mountain. The films in the Archive are likewise implicated in the discourses of the era, but their ability to capture movement makes them somewhat more humanizing. We can watch shoppers at a bazaar in Isfahan, a Japanese ceremony in Nikko, Parisians lining up outside a soup kitchen. Kahn’s cameramen were given a great degree of freedom in what they shot, and the results varied.

Left image shows soldier in navy uniform with red sash and fez standing in grassy field. Right image shows woman in white and blue traditional dress with ornate headdress against stone wall.

Two autochromes taken in Fez, Morocco, in 1913. Left, a Senegalese Tirailleur; right, a Moroccan woman – left, right.

Left image shows woman in blue áo dài dress sitting on wooden chair against weathered wall. Right image shows shirtless boy standing beside wall painting of tiger with Chinese characters.

Two autochromes taken in Hanoi, Tonkin, Indochina. Left, a biracial Chinese woman, 1916; right, a child at a temple in the village of Vinh-thuy, 1915 – left, right.

Portrait-style photographs from Egypt featuring two women in wrapped cloth garments against stone structure and close-up of bare-chested man with short hair next to woven reed structure, capturing facial features with dignified expressions.

Two autochromes taken in Egypt. Left, Bishari girls in front of a house, 1914; right, a Bara man in Port Said, 1918 – left, right.

Like all photographic technologies, an autochrome takes a moment from the present and transforms it into a relic of the past. It’s a process which, at odds with its medium’s preservatory aspect, evokes a sense of loss, as Roland Barthes explored in his seminal Camera Lucida. While painting can ape reality, he argued, it is always distinct from the world — photographs, on the other hand, contain a specter of real life. “Every photograph”, Barthes wrote, “is a certificate of presence”.10 But this certificate also functions as a kind of memorial, a presence that brings absence all the more to the fore. We feel this absence in the autochromes from Kahn’s Archives de la Planète, images that are somehow doubly removed from the present, their nostalgia even more amplified. This doubleness is the result of two intersecting factors: the photographic technology and the project itself. Even at the time of their unveiling, one could imagine autochromes emanating a vintage-like aura. The same compositions that were often chosen to maximize the technology’s chromatic potential — flowers, elaborate dresses, stiffly posed portraits — were also the subjects drawn on, for centuries, by painters. Indeed, owing to their overwhelming stillness, autochromes project a serenity at odds with the pace of everyday activity: from the get-go, they were already remnants of bygone worlds. Kahn’s project, too, inculcates nostalgia. In contrast to more-standard archival practices — in which items are rehomed following an event or death — the images in Archives de la Planète were, at their inception, created to be archival. These records of the present were always intended, in a sense, to be records of the past. When trawling through the Archives de la Planète (online or at the newly reopened museum on Kahn’s Boulogne-Billancourt property), it is almost impossible not to sympathize with his sense of loss. And the colors — the colors! — make that vanished world all the more palpable and all the more lost.