Even among keen students of photography, few have heard of Albert Kahn. Yet Kahn, a banker and philanthropist, was one of the first people to exploit the potential of colour photography, and used it to create a remarkable photographic record of the world in the early 20th century. He called it “The Archives of the Planet”.

The collection’s themes of displacement and loss are mirrored in Kahn’s own life. He was born in Alsace in 1860, and was ten when the Germans annexed the region after the Franco-Prussian War. Residents had a choice between becoming German citizens or emigrating to remain French. Kahn’s family chose the latter. At 16, he moved to Paris, where he made a fortune as a banker.

At his mansion in Boulogne-Billancourt, outside Paris, Kahn hosted salons that brought together some of Europe’s leading lights in politics, academia, business and the arts. It was through these circles that he heard, in 1907, about the Lumière brothers, who had just demonstrated an invention called the autochrome. Based on potato starch, it enabled the first user-friendly colour photography.

Kahn saw that he could use the autochrome to further two causes close to his heart: to record cultures at risk of vanishing due to what we now call globalisation; and his pacifist belief that showing the diversity of the world and its inhabitants would help put an end to war. “He wanted people to see there was nothing to fear from foreign cultures,” says David Okuefuna, who edited the book from which these photographs are taken.

Between 1908 and 1928, Kahn dispatched photographers to more than 50 countries around the world, recording everything from life in the trenches to shepherds in the Lebanon. Getting to these places was no small feat in itself: travelling with trunkloads of cumbersome equipment would be difficult enough now, let alone in the days before long-haul flights. Most of Kahn’s team were professional photographers, but his first pictures were taken by his chauffeur, Alfred Dutertre, during a tour of America, Canada, Japan and China in summer 1908. Those that have survived are some of the earliest known colour pictures taken in these countries.

The brief Kahn gave to his team was to get “a photographic inventory of the planet as it is inhabited and managed by humanity at the beginning of the 20th century”. And that is exactly what he got. By 1928 he had amassed 72,000 colour autochromes, the most important collection of early colour photographs in the world. Despite his enduring legacy, Kahn died penniless in 1940, ruined by the Wall Street crash 11 years earlier, a pacifist living in an occupied country. Yet according to the director of the Musée Albert Kahn in Kahn’s house at Boulogne-Billancourt, he retained his optimism about humanity to the end. And his archive lives on.

Visit the Albert Kahn website at www.albertkahn.co.uk

The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn: Colour Photographs From a Lost Age is published by BBC Books on April 24, and is available from BooksFirst priced £31.50 (RRP £35), free p&p, on 0870 1608080. Photographs © Musée Albert-Kahn 2008. Book text by David Okuefuna © Woodlands Books Ltd 2008

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