The World Of Albert Kahn

I accidentally caught a programme on BBC4 last night which was, I think, part of the 'Edwardians in Colour' series, about Albert Kahn. I'd never heard of him before, a French millionnaire who sent out a team of photographers and film-makers around the world to record the lives of everyday folk. As the blurb says,

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.

The Wall Street Crash ended the project as Kahn lost his fortune but he continued to live in his house outside Paris with his reels of films and boxes of glass negatives, and he died in 1940. The invading Nazis apparently saw no merit or worth in his collection so left it intact in the house which became a museum in the 1970s and is still open today.

I found myself being gradually drawn into the programme, the character of Mr Kahn and the travel factor - I'm a sucker for travel to far off lands. Peace through cultural understanding is an important concept - I understand why you are different so won't fear or hate you is powerful idea. At the time, it failed, and we suffered two world wars. But as a record of a bye-gone world, his collection is magnificent. These are real photos and films of real people in their own environments that no longer exist. The past 100 years have probably wreaked more change on the world than the previous 1000 years (or more) and the record provided by Mr Kahn's vision and productive use of his wealth tells us what it used to be like in this increasingly small world of ours.

A rather expensive book has been produced that includes many of the stills from the collection. There's also a website about Mr Kahn and the museum outside Paris. I'd like to visit one day.