Archives of the Planet
Life. We must seize it wherever it is, abroad, in the street, everywhere.
— Albert Kahn
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. Below are 50 of my favourites. Enjoy.
(All images in this post are courtesy of Musée Albert-Kahn.)
