Review: The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, BBC, 2007

The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn is a 9-episode BBC series exploring what must be the world’s most ambitious photography project.  Conceived and funded by French financier Albert Kahn, the plan was to send photographers to capture everyday life in every corner of the planet.  This was at the turn of the 20th century when travel wasn’t so easy, when there weren’t yet any airports, hardly any trunk roads, and no Hilton Hotels, Starbucks, or Lonely Planet guides.  More ambitious still, the project was to document local cultures using both motion camera and the world’s first reliable still color camera, the autochrome.  The series writers make it sound as if Kahn, whose Paris home served as repository for the collection (and is now a museum housing the same), was prescient in his understanding of how profoundly the world was changing and wished to document disappearing ways of life.  Could anyone at the turn of the century understand the radical upheavals just around the corner?  Several of the interviewees say as much about the people captured in Kahn’s collection, how innocent they appear in light of the catastrophes that would soon befall them.    

The project didn’t get started until 1908 and within six years Europe was engulfed in war.  While Kahn’s photographers succeeded in documenting the effects of the conflagration (if not the fighting itself), they were not able to get out and explore.  Once they could, there was only a decade left before world wide economic collapse put an end to Kahn’s fortunes and his ambitions for the Archive of the Planet.  Photographic work continued through the 30s, but there were no trips outside Europe.  

The series is engaging, well written, and suitably paced.   The scholars interviewed seem knowledgeable and have good presence before the camera. (Paula Amad has the most outrageous Ozzie accent). The story, though, is the war, and not photography.  Kahn employed a large number of photographers, who are typically introduced with a portrait and a name, but nothing more.  (A list with short bios can be found here.)  How were they selected?  How did they go about their jobs?  What were their particular challenges as photographers using new equipment in difficult situations?   How did war time rationing effect the production of camera equipment and plates?  How were plates sent back to Kahn, or new plates sent out to cameramen?  How were images reproduced for the French public?  The script notes that 2000 autochromes of WWI are on file in the Kahn collection (out of a total of 72,000 images).  Over a four year war, that is only 500 images a year, approximately 40 a month.  Why such a small amount?

Perhaps my only other quibble, or disappointment, was the decision to include sound effects.  It occurred to me only while watching chapter five that they had been added to Kahn’s movie footage – explosions, gun shots, clinking cans, plane engines, crowd voices.   How much more powerful it would have been if they had let the images “speak” for themselves, and speak for a time when sound was not possible. 

I started out watching the series hoping to learn something about 20th century photography but it seems I learned far more about 20th century history.  The predominate theme of the series is the homogenization of the planet, urbanization, population growth, and the rise of ethno-national hatred.  The loss of diversity is evident in the photos of local costume and custom, images which now seem quaint in presenting what we think of as “traditional culture.”  Likewise, the loss of environment to overcrowding can be seen in the picturesque 1909 village of Rio de Janeiro.  Fear and hate are most evident in episode seven, with Kahn’s cameramen visiting the Middle East to record the break-up of the Ottoman empire and the emergence of the new Arab states and Israel.  Survivors interviewed tell a story of mutual respect, how Jews and Muslims, Greeks and Turks, lived shared lives in the same villages and neighborhoods.  This was all upset by politicians.  As one of the interviewed scholars notes, separating populations based on ethnicity or religion seems like an easy way to avoid problems, but it creates among the survivors a life of nostalgia, of loss and longing. How little we seem to have learned.  

I have this week looked through The Dawn of the Color Photograph, a 300+ page collection of Kahn’s autochromes with text by David Okuefuna, the executive producer of the BBC series.  It provides the opportunity to dwell on images and to discover a few new photos not included in the film.  A reviewer at Amazon complains about Okuefuna’s political agenda, but frankly I don’t see what he’s on about.  There is a bit more information in the book about the cameramen and their work, but not all that much.  It looks the book I want will be published later this year.