Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet — The Public Domain Review

Like all photographic technologies, an autochrome takes a moment from the present and transforms it into a relic of the past. It’s a process which, at odds with its medium’s preservatory aspect, evokes a sense of loss, as Roland Barthes explored in his seminal Camera Lucida. While painting can ape reality, he argued, it is always distinct from the world — photographs, on the other hand, contain a specter of real life. “Every photograph”, Barthes wrote, “is a certificate of presence”. But this certificate also functions as a kind of memorial, a presence that brings absence all the more to the fore. We feel this absence in the autochromes from Kahn’s Archives de la Planète, images that are somehow doubly removed from the present, their nostalgia even more amplified. This doubleness is the result of two intersecting factors: the photographic technology and the project itself. Even at the time of their unveiling, one could imagine autochromes emanating a vintage-like aura. The same compositions that were often chosen to maximize the technology’s chromatic potential — flowers, elaborate dresses, stiffly posed portraits — were also the subjects drawn on, for centuries, by painters. Indeed, owing to their overwhelming stillness, autochromes project a serenity at odds with the pace of everyday activity: from the get-go, they were already remnants of bygone worlds. Kahn’s project, too, inculcates nostalgia. In contrast to more-standard archival practices — in which items are rehomed following an event or death — the images in Archives de la Planète were, at their inception, created to be archival. These records of the present were always intended, in a sense, to be records of the past. When trawling through the Archives de la Planète (online or at the newly reopened museum on Kahn’s Boulogne-Billancourt property), it is almost impossible not to sympathize with his sense of loss. And the colors — the colors! — make that vanished world all the more palpable and all the more lost.