Albert Kahn was a banker and French philanthropist. He was born Abraham Kahn at Marmoutier, Bas-Rhin, France on 3 March 1860, into a Jewish family, one of 5 children of his parents, Louis and Babette Kahn. He died at Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine, France on 14 November 1940,
In 1879 Kahn became a bank clerk in Paris, but studied for a degree in the evenings. His tutor was Henri Bergson, who remained his friend all his life. He graduated in 1881 and continued to mix in intellectual circles, making friends with Auguste Rodin and Mathurin Méheut. In 1892 Kahn became a principal associate of the Goudchaux Bank, which was regarded as one of most important financial houses of Europe.
In 1893 Kahn acquired a large property in Boulogne-Billancourt, where he established a unique garden containing a variety of garden styles including English, Japanese, a rose garden and a conifer wood. This became a meeting place for French and European intelligentsia until the 1930s when due to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Kahn became bankrupt. At that time the garden was turned into a public park in which Kahn would still take walks. Kahn died during the Nazi occupation of France.
In 1909 Kahn travelled with his chauffeur and photographer, Alfred Dutertre to Japan on business and returned with many photographs of the journey. This prompted him to begin a project collecting a photographic record of the entire Earth. He appointed Jean Brunhes as the project director, and sent photographers to every continent to record images of the planet using the first colour photography, autochrome plates, and early cinematography. Between 1909 and 1931 they collected 72,000 colour photographs and 183,000 meters of film. These form a unique historical record of 50 countries, known as “The Archives of the Planet”.
Kahn’s photographers began documenting France in 1914, just days before the outbreak of World War I, and by liaising with the military managed to record both the devastation of war, and the struggle to continue everyday life and agricultural work.
He also promoted education at the highest level through traveling scholarships.
The economic crisis of the Great Depression ruined Kahn and put an end to his project.
Since 1986 the photographs have been collected into a museum at 14, Rue du Port, Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, at the site of his garden. It is now a French national museum and includes four hectares of gardens, as well as the museum which houses his historic photographs and film.
Here you can see some of these astonishing and historic photography of wonderful world of Albert Khan. His collection of photos is taking us on a trip through a long lost world of different cultures living untouched and far from each other, before the globalization, mass media, and terrible transformation during which we all began eating McDonald’s, drinking Coca-Cola, smoking Marlboro, wearing the same clothes, liking the same things and laughing to the same jokes.
These photos are taking us to a somewhat romantic or romanticized world that maybe hasn’t ever possessed the features that we attributed to it. European people and West in general always had a bit mistaken ideas about the rest of the world and especially about the East, Asia and Africa. You can find more information about this ideas false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East in Edward Said’s famous book Orientalism.
We hold on to these crooked ideas of a distant, exotic and sensual East even today and you can see this in every Hollywood movie when starts some erotic scene you can hear oriental music, and every man’s dream is of a harem filled with wide-eyed belly dancers that can’t wait to fulfill every his wish and desire. The truth is this could not possibly be further form real East and especially the Middle East which is very conservative toward sexuality.
However wrong and superficial these ideas were that the West has about the East, we can not completely deny the historic and artistic value of these amazing images. It is for the best to simply relax and put all these ideas aside and enjoy in this amazing collection of this great philanthropist and world traveler from the beginning of the twentieth century. Let’s remind ourselves how the world used to look hundred years ago.
