The Dawn of the Color Photograph

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In 1909, French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn initiated an ambitious project to create a color photographic record of human life worldwide. Aiming to foster cross-cultural understanding and peace, Kahn utilized the autochrome, the first portable true-color photographic process, to build a global archive. Over two decades, he dispatched photographers to over fifty countries, resulting in more than 72,000 images. This extensive collection was largely forgotten until recently. Now, a century after Kahn began his "Archives of the Planet" project, a richly illustrated book and accompanying BBC series are reintroducing his remarkable early twentieth-century photographs to a broad audience, infusing color into what is often perceived as a monochrome past. The photographers documented cultures on the verge of transformation due to war and modernization, capturing the last years of Ireland's Celtic villages and the final days of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. They also recorded First World War soldiers in trenches and postwar celebrations in London, alongside the earliest color photographs from diverse nations like Vietnam, Brazil, Mongolia, Norway, Benin, and the United States. Despite financial ruin during the Great Depression, Kahn's collection is now celebrated as one of the world's most significant archives of early color photography.