GARDEN'S ALBERT KAHN PHOTOGRAPHERS.pps

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GARDEN'S ALBERT KAHN
PHOTOGRAPHERS
Bert Koempfert Twilight
04.01.2016 101008
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ALBERT KAHN
In 1909 the millionaire French banker and
philanthropist Albert Kahn embarked on an
ambitious project to create a colour photographic
record of, and for, the peoples of the world. As
an idealist and an internationalist, Kahn
believed that he could use the new autochrome
process, the world's first user-friendly,
true-colour photographic system, to promote
cross-cultural peace and understanding. Kahn used
his vast fortune to send a group of intrepid
photographers to more than fifty countries around
the world, often at crucial junctures in their
history, when age-old cultures were on the brink
of being changed for ever by war and the march of
twentieth-century globalisation. They documented
in true colour the collapse of both the
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires the last
traditional Celtic villages in Ireland, just a
few years before they were demolished and the
soldiers of the First World War in the
trenches, and as they cooked their meals and
laundered their uniforms behind the lines. They
took the earliest-known colour photographs in
countries as far apart as Vietnam and Brazil,
Mongolia and Norway, Benin and the United States.
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At the start of 1929 Kahn was still one of the
richest men in Europe. Later that year the Wall
Street Crash reduced his financial empire to
rubble and in 1931 he was forced to bring his
project to an end. Kahn died in 1940. His legacy,
still kept at the Musée Albert-Kahn in the
grounds of his estate near Paris, is now
considered to be the most important collection of
early colour photographs in the world.
Until recently, Kahn's huge collection of 72,000
autochromes remained relatively unheard of the
vast majority of them unpublished. Now, a century
after he launched his Archives of the Planet
project, the BBC Book The Wonderful World of
Albert Kahn, and the television series it
accompanies, are bringing Kahn's dazzling
pictures to a mass audience for the first time
and putting colour into what we tend to think of
as an entirely monochrome age.
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T H E E N D
July 31,2009