When you step into the Musée Albert-Kahn, one of the most beautiful and extraordinary places in the whole of Paris, a notice on the wall speaks out to you in French and English:
Je ne vous demande qu’une chose, c’est d’avoir les yeux grands ouverts
I only ask one thing of you: keep your eyes wide open
This was a message given to students sponsored by Parisian banker, internationalist, documentarist and idealist Albert Kahn (1860-1940), on whose grounds in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western edge of Paris, the museum and its adjoining gardens are located. Over a period of thirty-three years (1898-1931) Kahn gave out scholarships to doctoral students, male and (from 1905) female, to travel the world simply to broaden their minds. The only requirement of such generosity was that they kept their eyes open.
The Autour du Monde scholarship scheme was but one aspect of a life at first devoted to making money and then to achieving global understanding. Kahn was an Alsatian Jew whose nationality switched from French to German to French as Alsace was annexed by Prussia following the Franco-Prussian War and when, aged only sixteen, he moved to Paris. Kahn joined a merchant bank, discovered a genius for investment, made his fortune out of South African diamonds and gold, and founded his own bank in 1898, aged just thirty-eight. At his peak he was one of the world’s richest men.
Whether through guilt, simple idealism, or the experience of extensive world travel as a part of his business, Kahn turned utopian. He put his money towards bringing the world together, promoting harmony through mutual understanding. The first expression of his vision was his gardens at Boulogne-Billancourt. First created in 1894 and subsequently developed by a succession of landscape designers and gardeners, the site, which grew over time to cover ten acres, turned into a reflection of the peaceful world that Kahn wanted to see. Individual sectors of the garden reflected different parts of the world: the Vosges forest as a memento of his Alsace childhood, Alpine, English, Japanese and French gardens, with an emphasis as much on landscape as plants.
The start of the gardens was followed by the Autour du Monde scholarships and then the grand central project, the Archives de la Planète. Inspired by a trip around the world he made in 1908, when accompanied by photographer/cinematographer Albert Dutertre, Kahn decided to capture the world in photography and film. He wanted to document a changing world and for people to learn from such a document. Under the direction of geographer Jean Brunher, five camera operators were sent out to cover every continent bar Oceania, forty-eight countries in total, over the period 1912-1931. The photographs were to be in colour, employing the haunting Autochrome process launched by the Lumière brothers, inventors of the Cinématographe, in 1907. 72,000 colour photographs were collected, along with 4,000 stereoscopic images and 600,000 feet of film, augmented by newsreel footage purchased from the Gaumont and Pathé firms.
The vision is astonishing; the money it must have cost scarcely to be imagined. But Kahn did more. He founded assorted documentation centres, established a centre for preventive medicine at the University of Strasbourg, organised conferences, formed charitable and academic foundations, worked with French war propagandists to document the First World War in colour (close to 3,000 autochrome images were made), and created a second gardens at Cap-Martin on the Côte d’Azur (which sadly has not survived). Though a private and retiring man, Kahn had a circle of friends and correspondents that ranged from philosopher Henri Bergson to poet Rabindranath Tagore. He brought bankers, diplomats, politicians and thinkers to his garden. He kept his eyes wide open.
One thing, however, that he did not see or could not forestall, was the financial crash of 1929. Kahn lost almost everything. The many projects and foundations that he had supported lost their funding, while plans he had in place to preserve his work were in ruins. The Seine départment bought his Boulogne-Billancourt home and gardens. The gardens were opened up to the public in 1937 in time for the Paris World’s Fair (previously only invited visitors had had the pleasure). The following year it became a film and photography library. Abel Gance was among the filmmakers who borrowed material. Kahn was allowed to live on his house – which had been stripped of its furniture – sustained by a modest pension from the Seine départment. The Second World War made a mockery of all his idealism. He died in November 1940, happily not living to see the Nazis march in and occupy the place.
Astonishingly, Albert Kahn’s gardens and collections survived, though it was a long time before they were fully revived. The Nazis left, having churned up some of the grounds, taking parts of Kahn’s archives with them. Seized by the Soviets in 1945, these collections were returned to the museum in 2001. The core archive remained in the possession of the Seine départment. Some dedicated people worked over many years to bring Kahn’s vision back to life, work that increased in impetus from the mid-1970s onwards. The much-changed gardens were gradually restored to the original vision, aided by Autochrome records of how they had looked. Preservation of the Autochrome plates began, building on initial work done by former Archives de la Planète camera operator, Georges Chevalier. The films ended up at the French state archive Archives du Film. The idea of a museum began to take shape; research was undertaken into Kahn’s projects and his collaborators; publications followed.
A museum opened in 1986. Visitor numbers grew. There was growing academic interest and newspaper articles which opened more eyes to this extraordinary treasure trove. The enthusiasm generated helped inspire an ambitious development programme in the 2010s which led to the building of a new museum created by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, which opened in 2015.
It was in the middle of these modern developments that I became interested in the Albert Kahn story. BBC Four had broadcast a five-part documentary series in April/May 2007, The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, which had left viewers astonished by the beauty of the Autochrome colours but frustrated at how little information was available. I had just set up a blog entitled The Bioscope, which was devoted to early and silent cinema but which had also touched on colour photography. Several people came to the site looking for information on Autochromes and I decided to write a post which gave the history of the collection – still and moving images – and told people where to find out more. Searching for Albert Kahn became the most popular post on the site over its five-year history. Its success guided me to the sort of blog I felt best suited to provide – clear, informative, useful – leaving me with a special affection for Albert Kahn. I finally got to visit museum and gardens in 2014, then revisited them in August 2024, therefore experiencing the museum before and after its radical transformation.
To get to the Musée Albert-Kahn, you need to catch line 9 to Boulogne-Billancourt, a prosperous suburb at the western end of the Paris Metro. The museum is next door to the Metro entrance. The building immediately catches the eye: rectangular in shape, angular with criss-crossing vertical slats. Inside, you are led down a long corridor which curves into an open area. It is the right-hand side of the corridor that astonishes. It is filled with hundreds of Autochrome images (all reproductions) in a grid stretching from floor to ceiling. Here is Kahn’s archive of the planet.
Faces and places from a hundred or more years ago take us into another world. The images are small – you have go get up close to engage with them. Once you do, the effect is overwhelming. The colour is subtle and ravishing (bravely, the display includes some instances of over-exposure or other colour failure). Autochromes have this grainy quality, caused by the use of potato starch in their composition, that gives them some of the quality of impressionist paintings mixed with the startling jolt of photographic realism. The people are so close and yet so far gone. Faces from Afghanistan, Indo-China (Vietnam), Algeria, India, Egypt, Mongolia, Dahomey, Syria, Japan, Greece, Turkey, Morocco and England, as well as visitors to the Kahn home and gardens, look out with eyes that say it is you, not they, that is the stranger. They have what may lie at the heart of the mystery of photography, which is that when we look at others we see ourselves. The Autochrome wall of the museum is like an infinite series of mirrors, each showing ourselves as somewhere else, quite lost and yet found again.
Next to the wall of images is an area with a set of interactive screens providing information on Kahn’s world and the Archives de la Planète. This is particularly well done. Floating still and moving images are called up by a mixture of serendipity and searching, leading the viewer deeper and deeper into the past. There are plainer screens celebrating those behind Kahn’s project, including the camera operators, and a remarkable installation where Kahn’s many supporters are illustrated by category: financier, politician, diplomat, cultural figures, royalty, and so on, from across the globe. Kahn’s world, it is made clear, was not simply a visual one but a social, financial and political one.
Then we turn into the gardens. Here is a little piece of heaven. The arrangement is by territories, with a formal orchard and rose garden with large greenhouse at its centre. You wander along paths through the Blue Forest and the Marshland, the Golden Forest and the Meadow, the Vosges Forest, the French and English-style gardens, the contemporary Japanese garden and the Japanese village. It is not precisely a walk through the world but certainly a walk through different yet complementary landscapes. You proceed through forest, garden and waters at the calming pace that the land dictates.
Interspersed throughout are artworks with a message. They have been picked, or curated, for the artist’s work having parallels to Kahn’s belief in the interconnectedness of societies, and keeping your eyes open. When we visited the works included a set of large-scale posters on Native American lands and history, an installation using photographs and messages about lost cats put up by people in Brussels, and rayograph images (photographs created without a camera) of plants inspired by the work of American surrealist Man Ray.
The highlight for most visitors is the Japanese garden and buildings. This was a particular passion of Kahn’s. He became entranced by Japan, its look and culture, when he first visited it on business. Soon he would become friends with the Japanese royal family. He had two Japanese wooden homes and a tea pavilion sent to France (the first two have been restored, the latter replaced), had a pagoda built (which burned down in 1953) and installed wooden bridges, of which the Red Bridge remains one of the treasures of the current site.
At the end of your journey, what have you seen? Albert Kahn wanted to observe the world, to preserve those observations, and for others to learn from them. This meant not only not how the world looked but the global harmony he sought. There was an equal need to preserve the idea of this and make it something from which others might benefit. The restored museum and gardens, along with the publications, studies, exhibitions and displays have successfully retained Albert Kahn’s vision. He would recognise the place, and approve.
But it is a lost world, not simply because it was put together – collection and garden – over a century ago, but because the harmony has been lost. The two world wars exposed the hopes of Kahn, and others utopian dreamers like him, as wretchedly naive. The world lives by war. All photographs can be smashed, all gardens trampled on. The Musée Albert Kahn is not a portrait of the world but of the mind of one man, whose idealism has become a dream and a mystery.
Links:
- Some of the background information in this post comes from Luce Lebart, Musée Départmental Albert Kahn: Promoting a Humanist Vision (Gallimard, 2022), a handy, well-illustrated guide available in a number of languages
- Other books in English on Albert Kahn include David Okuefuna, The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn: Colour Photographs from a Lost Age (BBC Books, 2008); Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (Columbia University Press, 2010); and Trond Erik Bjorli and Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen (eds,), Cosmopolitics of the Camera: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet (Intellect Books, 2020)
- The website of the Musée Albert-Kahn is surprisingly rudimentary in design, but has all the necessary information. It includes Portrail Images, an extensive database of high resolution digitised images and film clips from the collection, 69,000 records in total. This is aimed more at commercial researchers than general users, but once you have mastered the filtering needed to narrow down searches there are such treasures to be found. Downloading of copyright-free works is possible if you register with the site. It is in English and French
- My 2007 blog post Searching for Albert Kahn has not been updated in many years but may still be a handy introduction, though many of the links provided are no longer active, inevitably
- There are a number of academic essays that look in depth at Kahn’s legacy. Freely-available ones include Teresa Castro, ‘Les Archives de la Planète: A cinematographic atlas‘, Jump Cut No. 48, winter 2006, and Thomas Smits, ‘Revisiting the Kahn collection: multimodal artificial intelligence and visual patterns of presence and absence in the Archives de la Planète, 1909–1931‘, Visual Studies, 1–17 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2024.2380859
- The DVD of the beautiful BBC Four series The Wonderful World Of Albert Kahn is still available from the usual sites
- My photograph album of the Musée Albert-Kahn, with images from 2014 and 2024, is available on Flickr
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