Leandro Lopes -- Exceptional Photography from an Exceptional Young Man

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Albert Kahn's Archive of the Planet

Clockwise: Irish woman in Claddagh; dancers in Thailand; Marrakesh.

I am staying in the home of a British woman who lives in Vejer, watching her dog Toby while she is in Portugal. One of the percs of living in a British home is watching the BBC. How they manage to consistently produce not just fine TV but EXCELLENT TV is a mystery to those of us beaten down by the shit that passes for TV in the States.

I recently watched two of the five episodes of The Edwardians in Color, a documentary on the efforts of Albert Kahn to compile his Archive of the Planet by sending photographers throughout the world to photograph natives going about their daily business. The remarkable thing, and I could scarcely believe my eyes, is that the photographs are in color. Beautiful delicate magnificent color.

The Archives de la Planète gather 4,000 stereoscopic plaques, 72,000 autochromes (constituting therefore one of the largest collections in the world) and around 183,000 meters of film, which amount to more than 100 hours of projection. They document forty-eight countries in the world, from every continent except Oceania. They were shot between 1912 and 1931 by five cameramen under the close supervision of the French geographer Jean Brunhes (1869-1932), chosen by Albert Kahn to oversee the constitution of the archives from their very beginning. The collection's purpose, according to Kahn, was “to put into effect a sort of photographic inventory of the surface of the globe as inhabited and developed by Man at the beginning of the twentieth century.” Most films in the collection are unedited rushes, ranging from scientific and ethnographic genres to actualities and other “pre-documentary” forms. The collection is an extraordinary historical document, containing unique testimonial of public and everyday life in the interwar years, and it represents one of the first projects in film history to envisage film strictly as an historical document. Check out the web site below for more information and if you get a chance, look for this documentary when it comes out on DVD. As a photographer and anthropologist, I find this archive mesmerizing, knowing that by some miracle, Albert Kahn began this project just at the turn of the 20th century, not knowing that so many of the cultures he caught on film would be gone in a matter of decades.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/albert-kahn.shtml