Cosmopolitics of the Camera: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet

In Cosmopolitics of the Camera, the leading experts in the field present Les Archives de la Planète (The Archives of the Planet) – Albert Kahn’s stunning collection of early colour photography and documentary film – and discuss the extraordinary intellectual context from which it grew. The archives, collected between 1909 and 1932, show the cultural richness and diversity of humanity at a time of drastic geographical and historical change. Consisting of 183,000 metres of film, 72,000 autochromes and more than 6,000 stereographs, it portrays the beauty and creativity of cultures, and their fatal disappearance of which Kahn believed to be only a question of time.

The Archives of the Planet was one of a string of institutions for research and international cooperation established in Kahn’s utopian World Gardens near Paris. Some of the best-known minds of the age met there regularly in order to discuss the problem of how to make new media of communication serve the cause of peace and human development. The Cosmopolitics of the Camera presents ten expert voices from seven different countries, studying the work of Kahn and his key collaborators, the geographer Jean Brunhes and the philosopher Henri Bergson, in the spirit of their culturally diverse venture, placing it in its proper historical and intellectual context, and exploring its ambitious achievements and failures. By pushing Kahn’s work back into active discussion, the analysis forces us to reflect on the ways our world is shaped and recorded by the media, and reactivates the time capsule that Kahn designed to communicate with the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789381900

Book preview

Cosmopolitics of the Camera

Cosmopolitics of the Camera

Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet

Edited by Trond Erik Bjorli and Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen

First published in the UK in 2020 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2020 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

© Signed texts, their authors

© Rest of the book, the editors

Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copy editor: MPS Technologies

Cover designer: Aleksandra SzumlasCover image: The spiral minaret of the great mosque of Samarra, Iraque, photographed 19 May 1927. Autochrome by Frèdèric Gadmer for Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète.

Albert Kahn Museum. A 54 379 S.

Frontispiece image: Original filing cabinets for autochrome plates, sorted by country. Photograph by Pascal Bedek. Archives of the Planet. Département des Hauts-de-Seine, Albert Kahn Museum.

Production manager: Mareike Wehner

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Print ISBN 978-1-78938-189-4

ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-191-7

ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-190-0

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Contents

Introduction

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen and Trond Erik Bjorli

Part 1: History of the Collection

1. The Archives of the Planet: Between Science and Action

Valérie Perlès

2. Photography, Gunpowder and Fertilizer: Albert Kahn’s Norwegian Journey

Trond Erik Bjorli

3. Japan in The Archives of the Planet

Anne Sigaud

4. The Archives of the Planet and the First World War

Emmanuelle Danchin

Part 2: Cosmopolitics

5. Pacifist Photography: Seeing the Face of Humanity

Jay Winter

6. Experimental Cosmopolitanism: The Limits of Autour du Monde-ism in the Kahn Archive

Paula Amad

7. The Kahn Archive: A Visual Memory That Is Truly Cosmopolitan?

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen and Milena Nikolova

8. The Archives of the Planet: Between Cosmopolitanism and Patriotism

Anne Sigaud

9. Henri Bergson and Albert Kahn: The Cosmopolitan Method

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen

Part 3: Aesthetics of a World Archive

10. Autochromes in Service of Human Geography: Jean Brunhes and the Aesthetics of The Archives of the Planet

Franziska Scheuer

11. Bergson’s Aesthetics? Autochroming a World of Memories

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen

12. Digital Returns: The Archives of the Planet and the ‘Rhythm of Life’

Trond Lundemo

Postscript: The Digital Futures of Historical Media Archives

Wolfgang Ernst

References

Bibliography

Introduction

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen and Trond Erik Bjorli

(Nord University, Norwegian Museum of Cultural History)

From 1909 until the early 1930s, Les Archives de la Planète documented cultural diversity in some 60 countries. Long unknown and neglected, interest in this, the world’s greatest collection of early colour photography and a unique collection of early documentary film has been growing over the last decades. A new and greatly enlarged Albert Kahn Museum, designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kumo, is opening on Kahn’s former estate in the Boulogne, a southern suburb to Paris. Since its foundation in 1986, the Kahn museum has engendered a series of publications, notably the grand collective biography Réalités d’une utopie that appeared in 1995. With the new millennium, publications in other languages than French began to appear. In his 2006 book Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century, Jay Winter highlighted Albert Kahn. The following year, the BBC released a TV-series in nine episodes, entitled Edwardians in Colour: The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn. The first and so far only scholarly monograph in English is Paula Amad’s Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète from 2010. Amad’s book deals, however, only with the film part of the archive. Cosmopolitics of the Camera is thus the first book-length scholarly presentation of the Kahn Archive in English. It results from longstanding and vivid intra-disciplinary dialogue across continents, very much in the spirit of Albert Kahn. Ten experts from seven countries discuss The Archives of the Planet, its history and intellectual context, ambitions, achievements and failures. Postcolonial studies and cosmopolitan philosophy enter into dialogue with film studies and the history of photography, and with perspectives from media archaeology and archival studies.

The Archives of the Planet contains material from the years 1909 to 1932. It was officially founded in 1912, when the human geographer Jean Brunhes was named scientific director. The collecting of material ended when Kahn lost his fortune in the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Over a period of about twenty years, Albert Kahn sent photographers to four continents. The stated purpose was ‘to gather a kind of inventory of the surface of the globe inhabited and developed by man as it presents itself at the start of the 20th Century, […] in order to fix once and for all the practices, the aspects and the modes of human activity, whose fatal disappearance is only a question of time’.¹ These are the terms used by Kahn in the letter where he offers Jean Brunhes the position as director of the archive. Truly an enticing job for a young and ambitious cultural geographer! Upon taking up the position, the geographer stated the purpose of The Archives of the Planet in his own words. It was ‘to establish what amounted to a catalogue of humanity captured in life at full, at the beginning of the 20th century, at the critical hours of one the most complete economic, geographical and historical transformations ever observed’.² The two declarations of intention display a slight difference of emphasis and understanding. Where Kahn notably wanted to document traditions that were in the process of being wiped out by modernization, Brunhes showed an interest in the process of transformation itself.

The methods of documentation were live film and the newly invented colour transparency photography, true colour slides, produced in a single shot. Filmatic movement and photography in colour were to communicate human diversity and dignity, thus serving the cosmopolitan cause. This was always a multimedia collection. In the very earliest documentations, as in those from Norway and Sweden in 1910, stereo photography was used instead of film, along with colour photography. Today, the Kahn Archive consists of 72,000 autochromes, 183,000 meters of film and 6500 stereographs. It is an archive of astonishment, collected by people who saw no contradiction between science and wonder; knowledge and imagination. It was made not only to document everyday life on a planetary scale, but also to display the élan vital of human creativity, and make the spectator marvel at its culture richness and endless creativity. The first meeting with Kahn’s material therefore offers a slight shock. A historical period that we have grown accustomed to seeing through crisp black and white photos suddenly presents itself in fully realistic and true colours. Part of this shock has to do with the qualities of the colour technology that was used. Autochromes have a lovely distinct colour reproduction. With its delicate and harmonic hue, the autochrome is considered to have been perhaps the most beautiful of colour photographic technologies. The slides have indeed withstood a century of storage very well, with little loss of freshness in the colours. Exploring the Kahn Archive is like watching a historical world anew, revived, different and yet familiar. The period in time covered is a dramatic one. Documentation started in 1909, at the highpoint of the belle époque, but the operators soon found themselves documenting the troubles on the Balkans and the disaster of the First World War, class struggle and the drama of Revolution, the intensity of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and finally the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Today, this period is known through the hundreds of thousands of black and white photographies that constitute our collective memory. An epoch comes back to us with unexpected liveliness. This triggers an afterthought concerning the ubiquity of technological mediation in modern societies. Seeing the early twentieth century through the medium of the autochrome is to see it with new eyes, an experience which carries with it a reflective insight into how every epoch and every culture is shaped by the media through which it communicates and through which it stores information about itself.

Cosmopolitanism and the Visual Media

The Kahn Archive reflects a wish for dialogue, not just among peoples in far-flung places but among eras of history. It is a time capsule, designed to communicate with an unknown future. In recent years the Kahn museum has chosen to use new technology to render its funds publicly available. Both images and texts from the archives are being digitized and uploaded in the Fakir database, where they may be consulted by researchers on site. Since 2017, a simplified low resolution version of the database is freely available on the Internet.³ In addition an older and smaller database is available on the World Wide Web, in form of the mappemonde, where one may select autochromes and a few films by clicking on a world map.⁴ The Archives of the Planet has re-emerged in digitized form, in the midst of globalization processes swifter and more intense than anything experienced in Kahn’s time.

Globalization denotes all those processes that smooth space; reducing inertia and making distance irrelevant. Globalization and media are, as Kahn and his contemporaries very well understood, closely intertwined. In the belle époque humanity was globalized not only through trade and imperialism but also notably by the advent of photography and the telegraph, film, radio and gramophone. Faraway places that were previously known only through the very indirect medium of the spoken or written word, could now be transmitted through visual and auditative media. The telegraph and the telephone allowed for communication in close to real time, where the delay had recently been weeks and months. In Kahn’s generation, technology enabled mobility and communication not only across space but also time, as photography, film and the gramophone revolutionized social memory. And yet the analogue media of Kahn’s age were very different from the digital media of today and so were regimes of power and social organization. Today, the Kahn experience offers leverage for historical reflection on a nexus of problems concerning archival theory, media and communication technologies, globalization and cosmopolitanism. In an increasingly globalized environment, Kahn and his collaborators worked to make new media of communication and information storage serve peace and cooperation rather than destruction and terror. The promises, failures and lessons of Kahn’s cosmopolitan strategies form the main topic of this book.

In June 2011, The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum) opened an exhibition which paid special attention to one of those documentations, those produced by Kahn and his associates in Norway in 1910. The exhibition was accompanied by a large and detailed catalogue in Norwegian, edited by the curators Trond Bjorli and Kjetil Jakobsen. A major research effort lay behind the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue. A lot of new knowledge, not only about the Nordic voyage, but about Kahn and The Archives of the Planet, was uncovered, and is here presented for an international public for the first time. In September 2011, Kahn-specialists from around the world met for a state-of-the-art conference in Oslo. The proceedings therefrom form the core of this book. In addition, Valérie Perlès and Anne Sigaud from the Albert Kahn Museum in Paris contribute three chapters, which also bring significant new information about Kahn and the collection. In recent years there has been a renewal of Kahn-scholarship in France, as testified by the appearance in 2019 of two new collective volumes by the team of the Albert Kahn Museum.⁵

Cosmopolitan Entrepreneurship

Albert Kahn (1860–1940) was a French banker, investor and philanthropist. He made his fortune by investing in gold and diamond mines in South Africa. Later he helped provide capital for the modernization of Japan, and became a friend of the Japanese imperial family. Kahn began early on to spend his money on various projects designed to promote understanding and peace among peoples. In 1898, he established Les bourses autour du monde – generous grants for round-the-world travel. They provided newly educated teachers and researchers from France, England, the USA, Germany, Japan and Russia with the means to spend up to eighteen months travelling in foreign countries. The goal was, in the words of Henri Bergson, ‘that widely shared feelings and ideas should be drawn by the elites of different countries into the pool of global experience shared by them, furthering the rise of what a great American scholar has named the international mind’.⁶

Kahn’s life is full of riddle and paradox. He was a tough businessman who spent half his time working hard making money, the other half working just as hard giving it away. The Sunday lunches in his Around the World Society, at which the famous men and women of the age gathered, were elegant and exquisite. The billionaire himself drank milk rather than champagne, stuck to his usual diet of vegetables, fish and bread, and dressed simply, wearing the same hat year in and out. Kahn devoted his life to civic engagement in Republican France, yet carefully avoided the public eye. The man who thought film and photography had the power to create peace and understanding, refused to be photographed. The only official portrait of Kahn is a pass photo. Some images do exist, though. Kahn lived surrounded by cameramen, and though strictly instructed not to take pictures of the boss, they sometimes could not resist the temptation. Thus, for example, research for the Kahn exposition at Norsk Folkemuseum brought to light a number of snapshot images of Kahn, taken secretly by his guide, the Norwegian photographer Andreas Beer Wilse. One paradox is particularly troublesome to research: The great organizer of archives left behind only sparse and unorganized sources to his life. Most of his personal papers have been lost, perhaps in connection with the German occupation. The archive of his bankrupt bank has also disappeared. Kahn’s Around the World Society did have an archive, but in 1940, this was taken to Berlin by the Germans. From there it went to Moscow with the Soviets in 1945, before coming back to Paris in parts in the 1990s. The archive of the cosmopolitans had itself travelled the world.

Due to the lack of sources, important questions concerning Albert Kahn’s life and works lay in the dark. A key question in a biographical study is that of the turning point or peripety. What made him depart from the – already unusual – trajectory of a wholly self-made man of money, and engage his fortune and talents in civic works of a very specific kind? Was there some kind of foundational experience in his life? We do not know, but we can try intelligent guesswork. Kahn’s philanthropic engagement began in 1898, with the institution of The Around the World Travel Grants, administrated through the Sorbonne. This was the culminating year of the Dreyfus-affair, when liberals successfully mobilized to save the Republic from violent anti-Semitism and reactionary nationalism and militarism. The Dreyfus affair must have made a strong impression on Kahn. He had the same background as the unfortunate Captain Dreyfus. Both were Alsatian Jews who had chosen French citizenship when the province was annexed to Germany in 1871. Kahn, who had changed his name to Albert from Abraham, was a very secular Jew; there is no evidence that he practiced the religion of his ancestors. Unlike his neighbour, business partner and friend Edmond de Rothschild, Kahn did not engage in the cause of Zionism, the new largely secular Jewish nationalism. Kahn chose a different path, that of combatting all nationalisms. It is likely that experiences from the Dreyfus-affair inspired Kahn to embark on a program to further peace and transcultural understanding.

Figure 1 Albert Kahn on the balcony of his bank. 102 rue de Richelieu, Paris. 1914. B/W photograph by Georges Chevalier. Département des Hauts-de-Seine, Albert Kahn Museum. I135X.

Kahn’s engagement with Japan and Japanese culture was also probably constitutive for his civic engagement. His Japanese ties were both professional and personal. In the 1890s, Japan became engaged in a rivalry with Russia over hegemony in the Far East. European finance backed the mighty Russian empire. French finance was virtually obliged to do so, due to France’s alliance with the Tsar. Already in 1897 Kahn, however, was organizing credit for Japan, and he was to remain, for decades, a player in the modernization of Japan.⁷ Kahn’s Japanese investments may in part have been a Jewish gamble: Tsarist Russia was notorious for anti-Semitism. However that may be, Kahn engaged deeply in Japanese culture. The Japanese gardens constructed at his Boulogne property between 1896 and 1909 are famous.⁸ In 1910, Kahn travelled through Norway with Japanese friends, and he repeatedly received Japanese notabilities in his French estates. These Japanese ties meant something at a time when racist prejudices and outright discrimination against Asians were common in Europe.⁹

Though Kahn’s philanthropic engagement began in 1898, his peripety could be situated at an earlier date. Kahn’s form of engagement demanded money, and it could be that he had postponed the engagement to a time when he had the means to make a difference. This happened in the second half of the 1890s. 1898 was the year when the Banque Goudchaux, where Kahn had started as a lowly employee two decades before, changed its name to the Banque Albert Kahn. Three years before, he had bought the first piece of the property which in the following years would be extended and developed into the World Gardens, seat of The Around the World Society and The Archives of the Planet. Kahn’s spiritual turning point need not be situated at the time when his philanthropic engagement began; a strong candidate for explaining Kahn’s unusual trajectory is simply his friendship with that extraordinary personality, the philosopher Henri Bergson. When Kahn matriculated and studied evenings, in the late 1870s, he had the one-year-older Bergson as his tutor. Thus began a lifelong friendship. One should note, however, that the civic engagement of Bergson, like that of Kahn, only began at a mature age. Until the late 1890s Bergson, like Kahn, concentrated on his professional life. From that point on, with both men having arrived where they were aiming career-wise, they would pool resources in a series of projects serving science, peace and cultural diversity. Kahn’s vigour and financial muscle matched Bergson’s intellectual force and network. Whether it was Bergson who inspired Kahn to become a financier with a social program or Kahn who helped Bergson descend from the Ivory tower, is not clear. This was, in any case, a productive relationship for both men.

A Life in History

Albert Kahn was a man of belle époque bourgeois culture; a dynamic entrepreneur, a positivist, pacifist and cosmopolitan, a staunch believer in human progress through science, technology and education. What is unusual is the force of his convictions and his willingness to act in accordance with them.

We do not really know what triggered Kahn’s engagement for peace, but childhood experiences from Alsace and the Franco-German war of 1870–1871 formed the backdrop. Kahn grew up in a family of moderate means in Alsace. His father traded in domestic animals, from an early age Kahn helped with the herding. The peace treaty, wherein France ceded Alsace to Germany, not only cost Kahn his native lands, it split his family, with one branch opting to take the German nationality and carry on in Alsace. As a teenager, Kahn left for Paris, seeking to make his way there. A man who did not offer himself much of a private life, but who devoted all his time and his entire energy to work and to humanitarian engagement, his life became bound up in the tragic history of Franco-German relations. Though not a ‘world historical figure’ the turning points in Kahn’s biography in his 80-year-long life are identical to those of European history, as if in a historical novel. Kahn was alienated from his Alsatian homeland due to the Franco-German War of 1870–1871, made a fortune during the Gründerzeit around 1890 and saw his world shattered by the First World War of 1914–18. His Boulogne circle played a role in the establishment of the League of Nations and its institutions in Geneva in the 1920s. Having participated in the fragile optimism of the ‘Roaring Twenties’, Kahn lost his fortune in the Great Depression of the early 1930s. He lived to see the demise of the third Republic and Hitler’s occupation of Paris. Only death saved him from witnessing and perhaps falling victim to the Shoah that was under preparation. Still, eyewitnesses say, Kahn remained to the very end an optimist with an indefatigable belief in the validity of his cosmopolitan values and the prospects for his projects and ideas. Kahn’s formative spiritual experience was perhaps Japan where he engaged with the arts, traditions and people of that far away island. For all of this, Germany was somehow Albert Kahn’s destiny. Throughout his life Kahn maintained ties with leading figures of German society and the German intellectual and scientific world. Kahn believed in his autochrome collection as an instrument of peace. Only once, did he let a major part of the collection leave Paris. In March 1914, as Franco-German relations grew more strained, over 300 autochromes were sent to Berlin, where they were shown to prestigious publics, Emperor Wilhelm II included.¹⁰

Albert Kahn travelled worldwide in his youth, for leisure and in connection with his profession as a global investor, and this obviously reinforced his belief in the educational effects of travel. He was a new kind of banker, a global investor who made his fortune in diamonds in southern Africa,¹¹ and who was a key figure when it came to financing the industrialization of Japan. As a businessman Kahn was no philanthropist. The mining industry in Africa, which enriched him, was European imperialism at its worst. Kahn was not the only major capitalist who turned to philanthropy. This was an age when robber capitalism sought social acceptance and legitimacy through humanitarian generosity; US-Americans Andrew Carnegie and David Rockefeller are famous examples. What is unusual about Kahn is that philanthropy eventually came to fill his life and that he gave it a distinctive, almost philosophical form, focusing on the problem of how new media of technological communication could serve the cosmopolitan cause. Kahn did not write much. The thinking and searching cosmopolitan appear instead in his humanitarian entrepreneurship. Although Kahn stayed out of the public eye, he involved himself more closely in philanthropic projects than his American counterparts did. In the Third Republic there was little tradition for private humanitarianfoundations. Kahn largely financed the projects of his own pocket, from year to year, a policy that proved fatal to most of them, when the banker lost his wealth during the great depression of the early 1930s.

Figure 2 Bonsais and blooming cherry trees at the foot of the pagoda, Albert Kahn gardens, Boulogne, France, April 1914. Autochrome by Auguste Léon. Département des Hauts-de-Seine, Albert Kahn Museum. B385.

As a businessman Kahn was no philanthropist, yet there is a connection between how he made his money and what he did with it. Money is a means of communication. Financiers bring production, consumption, raw materials, machinery and people together and help them cooperate. Kahn ran an investment bank with a global perspective. He brought capital, people, knowledge and resources from across the globe together on projects. Kahn the banker was known not only as a long-term visionary investor, but also as a risk taker; that became his downfall when the financial crisis struck in 1929. In the intellectual world as well, Kahn sought to be an investment banker. For this purpose, he acquired grandiose, but modern and functional villas at Cap Martin in the south of France and Cornwall in England. The villas lay on the beach, on the borderline between the concrete of the mainland and the open sea of abstraction. Above all, he created the World Gardens and The Archives of the Planet in Boulogne. Here some of the best-known minds of the age were assembled – great scientists, poets, artists, industrialists and political leaders – in order to discuss prospects for a better world. As with finances, Kahn kept himself discretely in the background. Being a global player in the world of finance, Kahn knew the importance of – and the feasibility of – cross-cultural collaboration. In 1898, he established Les bourses autour du monde (The Around the World Grants). Frustrated with how schools in the major powers fostered nationalism, Kahn launched a program to turn teachers into cosmopolitans. Talented young academics, especially teachers, received scholarships for up to 18 months to go travelling in foreign countries, ideally around the world. The purpose was, wrote Kahn, ‘to provide specially qualified teachers the opportunity to tune in with the life of the planet, so as to make teaching come alive by at long last replacing book knowledge with the realities of life’.¹² In a note distributed to recipients of the extraordinary scholarship, Kahn stressed the need to supplement abstract, bookish knowledge with concrete experience. ‘What do I do in return’, asked a perplexed recipient of the generous scholarship. ‘Take your cigarette pack and notepad, and keep your eyes open’, was Kahn’s answer. Henri Bergson, who had helped Kahn launch the program, retrospectively described the scholarships as being aimed at ‘opening every year to an elite of young teachers what Descartes called the great book of the world’.¹³ In 1905, Kahn opened the scholarships for female teachers, a radical move at a time when many found it repulsive that young women should be travelling the world without male company.

Candidates were expected to write a text for the organization’s bulletin about countries they visited. Some also took pictures. In 1913, Marguerite Mespoulet and another young French woman travelled around Ireland. Mespoulet – who had no training as a photographer – took some of the most unforgettable autochromes in The Archives of the Planet, portraying the everyday life of women on the impoverished West Coast.

The Around the World Scholarships are frequently compared with the Rhodes’ scholarships that Cecil Rhodes instituted in 1902. Both Kahn and Rhodes had earned a fortune in gold and diamonds from southern Africa. Rhodes gave scholarships that enabled Europeans from the colonies to study in Oxford. His scholarships aimed at sending youth from the periphery to the imperial centre and must be seen as a contribution to British imperial ideology, a chief representative of which Rhodes was. The Around the World Grants stand in no such direct relationship to the French empire. Kahn’s scholarships included not only France but also teachers in England, USA, Germany, Japan and Russia. Kahn did not urge candidates to prefer the French sphere; on the contrary, statute required them to master English well. For the French beneficiaries, every circuit started with a prolonged stay in England, learning the language. This anglophilia sets The Around the World Grants apart among French cultural initiatives.

In 1906, Kahn organized his Around the World fellows in The Around the World Society, known also as ‘the Boulogne circle’ or simply The Circle. Kahn’s young Around the World fellows were brought together for Sunday lunches at his Boulogne estate to meet with figures of world renown from scientific, artistic and political life. The aim was to further intercultural cooperation and knowledge building. Leaders in politics, science and the arts from around the world were invited to join or to participate in the meetings. Besides Kahn’s old friends, the sculptor Auguste Rodin and the philosopher Henri Bergson, one finds the natural scientists Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, authors Thomas Mann, Paul Valéry, Colette, Anatole France, R. Tagore, H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, the industrialist André Michelin, the financier Edmond Rothschild and politicians Léon Bourgeois, Paul d’Estournelles de Constant, Aristide Briand, Joseph Austen Chamberlain, Ferdinand Buisson, Leon Bourgeois, Robert Cecil and Albert Thomas. The purpose of the circle was to continue and reaffirm the intercultural cooperation and exchange of knowledge made possible by the travel grants. At its height in 1931 it had 186 members. Members met every Sunday for informal lunches in a villa at Kahn’s estate. Kahn developed his estate as a utopian World Gardens supposed to form the perfect context for cosmopolitan conversation and research. During and after the First World War, the circle was linked up to La Comité National d’Etudes social et politique (The National Committee for Social and Political Studies – CNESP) and Le Centre de documentation social (The Centre for Social Documentation – CDS), the initiatives that Kahn took to further social research and documentation.

The CNESP was a forum for discussion for around 50 members of the French elite in culture, science, politics and finance and with invited speakers from the world’s trouble spots. The focus was on contemporary social problems in France, the colonial and development issues and the situation in the Soviet Union, Italy and Germany. The CNESP released an impressive amount of ‘bulletins’, funded and partly edited by Kahn. The texts often reported on work carried out at CDS, established at the École Normale in Paris in 1920. This was, as the name says, conceived as a centre for documentation within the social sciences. As with the centres for biological and medical research, which he also helped establish, Kahn was especially concerned with helping to fulfil the scientific potential of film and photography. The Archives of the Planet was with time meant to find its place here as the cultural geographical part of a larger project of filmatic and photographic documentation for social scientific purposes. That vision was never realized. The CDS became, however, something far more than a research library. At this time social research largely lacked an institutional base whatsoever in France, as in most other European countries. The CDS came to act as a bridgehead for such institutionalization and thus played an important role in the history of French and European social sciences. Unlike most other of Kahn’s other initiatives, the CDS survived the founder’s bankruptcy. The American Rockefeller Foundation took over the funding. In 1933, the CDS became home to the so-called Frankfurt School of Social Research, when Max Horkheimer took his group of scholars to Paris, following the Nazi takeover in Germany. In 1929, all of Kahn’s initiatives, were, in collaboration with the University of Paris, gathered in a Centrale de Recoordination. According to this agreement, the foundation would upon Kahn’s death receive a fund of nine and a half million francs. Together with other sources this should have allowed The Archives of the Planet and most of Kahn’s other philanthropic activities to continue within the framework of the university system.

History of the Collection

The official establishment of The Archives of the Planet followed in the wake of a phase of technical experiment. In the years 1908 to 1910 Albert Kahn travelled with friends and assistants to China and Japan (1908–1909), to Brazil (1909) and to Norway and Sweden (1910), trying out a wide range of supports for what was to become The Archives of the Planet. In August and September 1910, Albert Kahn explored Norway and Sweden together with Auguste Léon, his chief photographer and later head of laboratory of The Archives of the Planet. In the chapter on Kahn’s travel in Norway Trond Bjorli brings out a string of previously unknown material on the man, businessman and idealist Albert Kahn. The new material is both textual and photographic. Anders Beer Wilse, one of Scandinavia’s most famous photographers, was Kahn’s guide for part of his mission to Norway in 1910. Wilse later wrote about his experience with Kahn, and he discretely photographed the financier as he travelled the country. Images of Albert Kahn are sparse, since he refused to be photographed and avoided the public eye. Using Wilse’s material, we are able to present, for the first time outside of Norway, an extensive photographic documentation of Albert Kahn and his photographers at work, collecting material for The Archives of the Planet. Kahn and Wilse provide a fascinating contrast. Wilse was himself in the process of constructing a great photographic archive, over the Norwegians, and the two archive builders can instructively be compared. The nation builder and the cosmopolitan pursued contrasting strategies. As Kahn and Wilse travelled Norway in 1910, photography was moving from the family out into the public domain. Kahn made an unusual choice in seeking to use the camera politically while refusing all strategies of mass mediation. In his report from the voyage, Wilse marvels at what he takes to be the idiosyncratic eccentrics of Albert Kahn. Wilse stood for a strengthening of professional standards at the same time as the new possibilities inherent in mass mediation were explored. It was the modern vision at the time. Wilse’s strategies belonged, however, within a media regime which is today obsolete, at least in its classical forms. In an age of the social and interactive media, Kahn’s communicational philosophy, with its emphasis on the personal, the dialogical and the select, has regained actuality.

In addition to Kahn and the cameramen two scholarly personalities, Jean Brunhes and Henri Bergson, shaped the project. In Chapter 1, Valérie Perlès distinguishes four sets of interests for the documentation, and she reconstructs some of the ongoing dialogue between the founder Albert Kahn and the director Jean Brunhes concerning the objectives to be achieved with their unprecedented project. There was an ongoing debate concerning the interests of two emerging sciences geography and ethnography. Brunhes promoted his peculiar version of human geography whereas Kahn took a strong personal interest in ethnography. The autochrome archive was Albert Kahn’s mental child. Brunhes accepted to direct the documentation of the world in autochrome colour as a counter term to Kahn financing his professorship at the Collège de France. For his books and often for lectures, Brunhes would prefer black and whites. Once in charge of The Archives of Planet,