Archives of the Planet

Albert Kahn Exhibition at the National Photographic Exhibition, Temple Bar, Dublin

A young woman – a girl, really – looks directly at the lens, legs crossed, hands clasped like a lady, and she does not hide the dirty fingernails of her swollen hands. She is squinting a little and her rotten teeth are showing, but she isn't smiling, and she isn't quite at ease in front of the camera.

There is neither the sadness of photographs intended to capture Ireland's dismal poverty (even though it was impossible to ignore), nor the typical Victorian or Edwardian attitude that these are people who are happy to be poor and too simple-minded not to be. Nor is she a nationalistic image of Mná na hÉireann, or some guardian of Ireland's moral virtue. She is wearing a form of dress that was out of date even then (although perhaps she is dressed up and hauled out for foreign tourists, a la An Beal Bocht?), but her full frontal gaze is too arresting to be didactic.

She is just a girl, robust but not beautiful, and could be any teenage girl in Ireland, only this was taken in 1913, before 'teenager' existed. And yet her familiar face, the deep red of her cloak, the detail of her shawl all make the antiquity of this image so jarring. These photographs preserve by record world traditions that were disappearing; today these old pictures of quotidian life are juxtaposed with a shockingly modern technology at a surprisingly early date. Guess what? The 'olden days' weren't black and white after all.

These are part of the Archives of the Planet, an ambitious project funded by French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn which ran from 1908 to 1931. He aimed to create an archive that represented a geographical totality – a world map made out of portraits – not for imperialistic ends, but because he believed that worldwide dialogue would produce a cultural intimacy that could save the world. His mission was also made possible by the Lumiere brothers who patented the autochrome process in 1903, allowing for colour photographs to be produced using glass plates and potato starch dyed in primary colours. This is why the reds of subjects' clothing stand out so starkly, why the delicate patterns of the girl's shawl are offset rather than obscured by the shadows of its folds.

“It was the first major colour collection taken in Ireland, and it is of such high quality,” says Fidelma Mullane, who recently curated the original exhibition of the Irish material from the Musée Albert-Kahn in Galway. “But his main overarching vision was that world peace could be achieved, even though he had endured three wars.”

Kahn sent teams to collect still and moving images from more than fifty countries with the aim of documenting traditions at risk of being usurped by modernity, in the hope of facilitating mutual understanding. “A lot of the operators on photo missions went to countries in a state of conflict or flux, such as Ireland,” Mullane says, “Things changed more rapidly in places where there was conflict and war.”

Mullane, a freelance geographer, discovered the archive in Paris in the 1980s, when she was conducting research on Jean Bruhnes, considered the 'father of human geography', and whom Kahn appointed to direct the Archive. It was only when Galway City Museum invited her to guest curate an exhibition that she had the opportunity to bring the photos to Ireland.

Ireland in 1913 was a nation inchoate: the formation of the Irish Citizen Army, the Irish Volunteers, on the cusp of Home Rule, the Dublin lockout, and intensely poor. To Ireland Kahn and Bruhnes sent two French women, Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba, a graduate in English literature and a scientist, respectively, both teachers and proto-feminists. They arrived in Galway on May 25, 1913, documenting people and places in Galway city, The Claddagh and Headford before travelling eastwards along the Shannon through Athlone, and then along the River Boyne to Drogheda. “The Irish collection was the only one achieved by women. They were not photographers, but they took great photos, and they were the only ones who annotated their photos,” says Mullane.

These images are surprising not only for their colour, but also because the textures. And the intimacy of these portraits afford an aesthetic, not assigned by a photographer attempting to convey the terrible beauty of a sublime and noble savagery, but one the subjects themselves possess. Their descriptions are underlined by a gentle humanity, neither purely scientific nor a literary flight of fancy.

They note that even in 'impoverished Connemara', “In every conversation, I am asked, 'Do you like Ireland? Isn't it beautiful?'” They are surprised at the lyricism with which their subjects speak, and there is something in the pairing of photo and diary that seems more real, even though such long exposure shots are staged by necessity. At a time when so many figurative images are imbued with colonial surveillance or a nationalistic recalcitrance, these are just pictures of people being themselves. Perhaps it is because in 1913, fewer people were aware of the conventions of behaviour in front of a camera, or that were these women weren't trained in directing such behaviour. They look like film stills for the best movie never made about rural Ireland.

Today monochrome lends gravitas to a photograph, and when we see an image from a hundred years ago, we expect it to look a certain way: stoically posed, grainy, shadows making even the happiest image almost saturnine. Only when we see these images in colour do we realise that, without the task of imagining what the colours really are, there is so much more wondering to be done. The aura of antiquity is fleeting, and our image-saturated lives, and the speed at which technology moves have deprived photos and gadgets of the ability to shock with the new.

By this time, Ireland had been mapped, drawn, photographed and described to exhaustion, and always with an agenda, but these seem to transcend any sense of moral or political instruction. Kahn's collection does have an agenda, and controversy surrounds some of the photographs taken in other countries. But in their plainness, in the gentle marriage of the art and science of the photograph, these Irish images capture humanity, set the stage for Walker Evans and James Agee's merging of text, image and experience in the rural American Depression decades later in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

In two sadly ironic twists, Kahn lost all of his money by 1931, and despite his obdurate pacifism, his insistence that, despite living through the Great War, the War to End All Wars, world peace was still possible, he died destitute in 1940 during the German occupation of France. The Musée Albert-Kahn with its gardens, near Paris, are all that is left of his Archives of the Planet and while he did not complete the project, we are left with a unique collection which restores, even if for only a moment, the power of the photograph, of technology to leave us bewildered.

(from Temple Bar Magazine January 2008)