The Archives of the Planet

In November 1908, Albert Kahn, a French banker from a Jewish family who had made a fortune by speculating on emerging markets,[1] set off on a round-the-world-trip with his chauffeur, Alfred Dutertre.

Stereography was replaced with the autochrome process, which yielded color photographs but demanded long exposure times, and motion pictures were added.

He went to Mongolia first, and then on to India, where in January 1914 the British authorities denied him passage through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan, where he wanted to photograph the Afridi people.

[22] Frédéric Gadmer was sent to Weimar Germany in 1923; among the scenes he shot was the aftermath of a failed separatist insurrection in Krefeld.

[23] The last trip to India was made in 1927, where photographer Roger Dumas captured the golden jubilee of Jagatjit Singh, the ruler of Kapurthala State.

Lucien Le Saint made films of French fisherman in the North Atlantic in 1923, and Brunhes and Gadmer travelled for three months across Canada in 1926, visiting Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, among other places.

[25] In 1930, Gadmer mounted the project's first and only major expedition to sub-Saharan Africa, to the French colony of Dahomey (modern-day Benin).

[29] Images in the Archive include landmarks like the Eiffel Tower,[30] the Great Pyramid of Giza,[31] Angkor Wat,[32] and the Taj Mahal,[33] as well as numerous portraits of working-class people in Europe[34] and of members of traditional societies in Asia and Africa.

[36] Due to the long exposure time required by the autochrome process, the photographers were largely limited to shooting stationary or posed subjects.

[40] Busy had instructed the girl to go through her daily dressing ritual; he shot the film out of focus to obscure her nudity.

Subjects include statesmen such as British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and French prime minister Léon Bourgeois, British physicist J. J. Thomson, French writers Colette and Anatole France, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, and American aviator Wilbur Wright, among many others.