The Color of Memory Albert 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.
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.
