The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet
- ISBN-10
- 0691139075
- ISBN-13
- 9780691139074
- Category
- Photography / Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions / General
- Pages
- 335
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2008
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Author
- David Okuefuna
Description
In 1909 the French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn launched a monumentally ambitious project: to produce a color photographic record of human life on Earth. An internationalist and pacifist, Kahn believed that he could use the new autochrome--the world's first portable, true-color photographic process--to create a global photographic archive that would promote cross-cultural understanding and peace. Over the next twenty years, he sent a group of photographers to more than fifty countries around the world, amassing more than 72,000 images. Until recently his collection was all but forgotten. Now, a century after he began his Archives of the Planet project, this book--richly illustrated in color throughout--and the BBC series it follows are bringing Kahn's dazzling early twentieth-century pictures to a wide audience for the first time, and putting color into what we usually think of as a monochrome world.
Kahn's photographers captured times, places, and people we simply do not expect to see in color photographs. They documented age-old cultures on the brink of being changed forever by war, modernization, and Westernization, recording the last years of Ireland's traditional Celtic villages and the late days of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. They photographed First World War soldiers in their trenches as well as the postwar celebrations in London. In the course of their travels, they also took the earliest color photographs in countries as varied as Vietnam and Brazil, Mongolia and Norway, Benin and the United States.
After being financially ruined in the Great Depression, Kahn was forced to bring his project to a premature end, but today his collection of early color photographs is recognized as one of the world's most important. The Dawn of the Color Photograph makes it easy to see why.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Photography Books Index: A Subject Guide to Photo Anthologies
By Martha KreiselAnthologies of photographs are indexed by photographer, subject, and named individuals in portraits.
-
Douglas Johnson: Southwest Traditions and Modern Icons
By Paul Strand, Megan Fox, Gerald P. PetersDouglas Johnson: Southwest Traditions and Modern Icons
-
The Sixties
By Richard Avedon, Doon ArbusThe connection between all the rhetoric and all the poetry, between the words of a Black Panther and those of a rock star or a pacifist, between the scars of a pop artist and those of a napalm victim, have haunted and informed the ...
-
行星全书
By 尼尔马拉·纳塔瑞杰... 空间科学研究所(SSI)封底:美国宇航局(NASA),美国地质勘探局(USGS)第4页:美国宇航局(NASA),M·贾斯丁·威尔金森(M. Justin Wilkinson),德克萨斯州立大学(Texas State University),美国宇航局(NASA)约翰逊航天中心(JSC)工作人员雅各布(Jacobs Contract) ...
-
Of Time & Place: Walker Evans and William Christenberry
By Walker Evans, Thomas SouthallAlthough Evans and Christenberry share many of the same subjects and concerns, there is a dramatic difference to the meaning of their work.
-
Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (looking back)
By Louise LawlerBut Lawler is also an old-fashioned "artist's artist," long overdue for the kind of serious reconsideration and recognition that this volume affords.
-
Moving Pictures: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Museum Collections
By Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, John G. Hanhardt, Nancy SpectorDuring the late 1960s and 70s, a paradigm shift occurred within visual culture: photography and the moving image were absorbed into critical art practices. In particular, these mediums were used...
-
PARTIAL TO HOME PB
This book presents for the first time a selection of Imes's elegant, formally balanced black-and-white images, recorded over nearly twenty years, of local people, river baptisms, black baseball teams, backyards,...
-
The Western Photographs of John K. Hillers: "myself in the Water"
By Don D. Fowler, John K. HillersDescribes the federal expeditions Hillers accompanied to the American West
-
Reflections in a Looking Glass: A Centennial Celebration of Lewis Carroll, Photographer
By Lewis Carroll, Mark Haworth-Booth, Morton Norton CohenA groundbreaking book, the only volume of first-class reproductions of Lewis Carroll's photographs.Published on the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Reflections in a...