Archives of the Planet II

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Earlier this year, I shared some photographs from the incredible “Les Archives de la Planète.” From the original post:

It is a preposterous endeavour, to attempt to document the entire world, but that is exactly what Albert Kahn tried to do.

Born in 1860, the French Jewish merchant was both a pacifist and an internationalist. He believed firmly in the brotherhood of man and that this world and the human cultures within it are objects of great beauty. After making his fortune, Kahn undertook a momentous project which he called “Les Archives de la Planète.” His aim was to capture a world he feared was disappearing.

Over the years spanning 1908 to 1931, Kahn dispatched a small army of photographers to all ends of the Earth to document the landscapes, communities, and people they found there. The results, some 72,000 shots of 50 different countries, taken using very early colour photography techniques, are mesmerising.

Sadly, Kahn lost most of his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash and so had to discontinue the project in the early 1930s. He would die in the 1940s, soon after Paris fell to the Nazis.

Thanks to the painstaking work of the Musée Albert-Kahn, many of the photographs have now been digitised and made available online.

Readers seemed to really enjoy that post — it even went mini-viral on X courtesy of

Miguel García Álvarez

— so I thought I’d share 50 more photos from the Albert Kahn archive. Enjoy!

(All images in this post are courtesy of Musée Albert-Kahn.)

Wrestlers from Indochina saluting the village “Génie” in Ha-Dong province, Tonkin (1915)

The hands of a scholar in Tonkin, Indochina (1915)

tea house hidden by the greenery of the “Japanese village” at Albert Kahn’s Boulogne-Billancourt property (1910)

A fisherman and his wife in Volendam, the Netherlands (1919)

A mass at New York City’s St Patrick’s Cathedral (1908)

Left, the Rue Boutebrie; right, the Boulevard de Clichy, Paris. (1914)

Left: autochrome of women in Corfu, Greece, 1913; right: autochrome of two women from a douar in Sidi Kacem, Morocco, (1913)

Firefighters gathering for a review near Hibiya Park in Tokyo (1909)

Sunset over West Lake (“Le Grand Lac”) in Hanoi, Tonkin, Indochina (1915)

Watermelon market on Corfu, Greece (1913)

A street in San Francisco, California (1908)

Left: Actress Matsumoto Tome dressed as a geisha in Kyoto, Japan, (1912); right: Condemned man, perhaps a soldier, punished by cangue in Urga (Ulaanbaatar), Mongolia (1913)

The Ziggurat of Assur, Iraq (1927)