The Color of Memory
Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet
by: Grace Linden
In November 1911, Albert Kahn, a French banker, 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 film makers to criss-cross 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.by: Grace Linden
Kahn’s work took him overseas to South Africa and Japan, and later 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. There he received a variety of illustrious guests including Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Thomas Mann, and Rabindranath Tagore.
Autochrome of Rabindranath Tagore at Albert Kahn’s Boulogne-Billancourt property, 1921 – Source.
Autochrome of a tea house hidden by the greenery of the “Japanese village” at
Albert Kahn’s Boulogne-Billancourt property, 1910 – Source.
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.
Stereograph of mass at New York City’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, 1908 – Source.
Stereograph of firefighters gathering for a review near Hibiya Park in Tokyo, 1909 – Source.
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.²
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.³
Two autochromes captured in Paris in 1914. Left, the Rue Boutebrie; right, the Boulevard de Clichy – Source: left, right.
Two autochromes captured in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1912 – Source: left, right.
Autochrome of wrestlers from Indochina saluting the village “Génie” in Ha-Dong province, Tonkin, 1915 – Source.
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 marshalled 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.
Autochrome of sunset over West Lake (“Le Grand Lac”) in Hanoi, Tonkin, Indochina, 1915 – Source.
Autochrome of “the hands of a scholar” in Tonkin, Indochina, 1915 – Source.
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.⁴ 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.”⁵
Left: autochrome of women on Corfu, Greece, 1913;
right: autochrome of two women from a douar in Sidi Kacem, Morocco, 1913 – Source: left, right.
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.
Autochrome of a watermelon market on Corfu, Greece, 1913 – Source.
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 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.
Two autochromes taken in Fez, Morocco, in 1913. Left, a Senegalese Tirailleur;
right, a Moroccan woman – left, right.
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.
Two autochromes taken in Egypt. Left, Bishari girls in front of a house, 1914;
right, a Bara man in Port Said, 1918 – left, right.
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Grace Linden is a writer and art historian. She lives in London.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.
First published December 11, 2024 in The Public Domain Review.
Notes:
- Kahn paraphrased in a letter from Emmanuel Jacquin De Margerie to Jean Brunhes in Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 49.
- Elizabeth Emery, “Protecting the Past: Albert Robida and the Vieux Paris Exhibit at the 1900 World’s Fair”, Journal of European Studies, vol. 35, no. 1 (March 2005), 66.
- Laura Anne Kalba, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 4.
- R. Child Bayley, The Complete Photographer, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen and Co., 1908), 291.
- Bayley, 290–291.
- See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), among others.
- Amad, Counter-Archive, 50.
- Ibid., 296.
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 87.
