Archives of the Planet

The Albert-Kahn Departmental Museum preserves the Archives of the Planet, a set of still and moving images, made at the beginning of the 20th century, devoted to the diversity of peoples and cultures.

Images at the service of the search for peace and dialogue between cultures.

"Stereoscopic photography, projections, cinematographs above all, this is what I would like to make work in large order to fix once and for all aspects, practices and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is only a matter of time". Albert Kahn, January 1912

Albert Kahn is driven by an ideal of universal peace. His conviction: Knowledge of foreign cultures encourages respect and peaceful relations among peoples. He also perceived early on that his time would witness the accelerated transformation of societies and the disappearance of certain ways of life.

He then created the Archives de la Planète, the result of the work of a dozen operators sent to the field between 1909 and 1931 in order to grasp the different cultural realities in some 50 countries. The project's ambition led it to entrust its scientific direction to the geographer Jean Brunhes (1869-1930), one of the promoters of human geography in France.

Two inventions by the Lumière brothers were used: cinematograph (1895) and autochrome, the first natural colour photographic process (1907).

The Archives de la Planète brings together around 100 hours of films, 4 000 stereoscopies and 72 000 autochromes, making it the largest collection in the world.

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