The Archives of the Planet
A project to document human life in fifty countries in the first colour process.
Salix — CC BY 2.5 · Rémih — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Rémih — CC BY-SA 4.0 · AlSepPhoenix — CC BY-SA 4.0
The first practical colour photography process, developed by the Lumière brothers and released in 1907. It uses dyed potato-starch grains on a glass plate and produces a distinctive soft colour. Seeing the world of 1910 in colour rather than black and white changes the sense of distance in time entirely — and that is this museum's effect.
Yes, and it is among the best half days around Paris. The site is directly on the metro so it is not truly far, and combining the photographic archive with the gardens makes for a varied visit. Go on a clear day to get the gardens.
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A museum and gardens in Boulogne-Billancourt west of Paris, created by the banker Albert Kahn in the early twentieth century, combining an extraordinary photographic project with gardens in several styles. The photographic project is the important part: between 1909 and 1931 Kahn funded expeditions of photographers to some fifty countries to document how people lived, using autochrome, the first practical colour process. The result is around seventy-two thousand colour photographs of the world in the early twentieth century — among the oldest colour images in existence for many of those places. He called it the Archives of the Planet. The gardens surround the museum and include Japanese, French and English gardens and a rose forest, laid out to be walked as a sequence of different atmospheres. Practical points: the museum reopened in a new building designed by Kengo Kuma. Reach it on metro line 10 to a nearby station — outside the Paris boundary but within the transport network. Allow half a day; the gardens alone deserve an hour.
A project to document human life in fifty countries in the first colour process.
For many of those countries these are the oldest colour photographs that exist.
Japanese, French and English gardens and a rose forest, walked as a progression.
Boulogne-Billancourt, immediately west of Paris