Wonderful World Of Albert Kahn

Product Description

In 1909 the millionaire French banker & philanthropist Albert Kahn embarked on an ambitious project to create a colour photographic record of & for the peoples of the world. As an idealist & an internationalist Kahn believed that he could use the new Autochrome process the worlds first user-friendly true-colour photographic system to promote cross-cultural peace & understanding. Until recently Kahns huge collection of 72 000 Autochromes remained relatively unheard of. Now a century after he launched his project this book & the BBC TV series it accompanies are bringing these dazzling pictures to a mass audience for the first time & putting colour into what we tend to think of as an entirely monochrome age. Kahn sent photographers to more than 50 countries often at crucial junctures in their history when age-old cultures were on the brink of being changed for ever by war & the march of twentieth-century globalisation. They documented in true colour the collapse of the Ottoman & Austro-Hungarian empires the last traditional Celtic villages in Ireland & the soldiers of the First World War. They took the earliest known colour photographs in countries as far apart as Vietnam & Brazil Mongolia & Norway Benin & the United States. In 1929 the Wall Street Crash forced Kahn to bring his project to an end. He died in 1940 but left behind the most important collection of early colour photographs in the world.