The Archives of the Planet: The Life and Works of Albert Kahn

Abstract

Surrounded by a beautiful garden, the Albert Kahn museum in Paris houses the most important collection of autochromes in the world. This corpus, known as The Archives of the Planet, was created by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker who, during and after World War I, ran the project to collect visual documents (photographs and films) about small economic and cultural units about to disappear, in order to promote peace through a better understanding between people of different cultures. The collection of these documents was made by professional cameramen who, before going to the field, were taught basic principles of human geography as conceptualized by the French scholar Jean Brunhes. This ambitious endeavor, which came to an end in 1932 because of Albert Kahn's bankruptcy, left us with a valuable testimony about the way European elites were relating to science, visual technologies and to other dominated societies at the turn of the 20th century. In brief, the Albert Kahn Museum and the Archives of the Planet are worth a visit for both aesthetical and intellectual reasons.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This short introduction to the Archives of the Planet would not have been possible without the helpful assistance of the Albert Kahn Museum's staff, who provided me with all kinds of information and allowed Visual Anthropology to publish the pictures that illustrate this article.

Notes

Altogether 300,000 printed pages which are kept in the BDIC (Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine), located in the Paris–X Nanterre University.

I chose the expression “globalization process” to translate the French word mue (moulting ?), which Brunhes used to designate the great changes affecting the world at the turn of the 20th century.

See Bonhomme and Jean-Brunhes Delamarre [1993] for a more detailed account of Brunhes’ methodology.

A practice which, because of the heat generated by the projector, was very harmful to the long-term preservation of the plates. Fortunately only a small number of them were treated that way.

See Lavédrine et al. [2009] for a description in French of this remarkable technology, and Lavédrine and Gondolfo [2013] for a thorough account in English.

Knowing that the words associated with the images do not equal them, one could benefit from the popularizing works made by David Okuefuna—two books [published in 2008] and an audiovisual product edited [2011] by the BBC—which offer the best overall view so far of the Archives of the Planet.

Meanwhile the team in charge of the preservation and development of the Archives has just published a new book on Albert Kahn [Kutniak 2015].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jean-François Werner

JEAN-FRANÇOIS WERNER is an anthropologist working for the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) in France. He has spent the last twenty-five years studying how mechanical means of visual representation have been appropriated by contemporary West African societies, and how people are using them to cope with the modernization process. In this work he has been interested in the social uses of family photography in Côte d'Ivoire, the reception of telenovelas by women in Senegal, and lately by the appropriation of medical imaging technologies (radiography and MRI) in Senegal.