Cosmopolitics of the Camera

Description

In Cosmopolitics of the Camera, the leading experts in the field present Les Archives de la Planète (The Archives of the Planet) – Albert Kahn’s stunning collection of early colour photography and documentary film – and discuss the extraordinary intellectual context from which it grew. The archives, collected between 1909 and 1932, show the cultural richness and diversity of humanity at a time of drastic geographical and historical change. Consisting of 183,000 metres of film, 72,000 autochromes and more than 6,000 stereographs, it portrays the beauty and creativity of cultures, and their fatal disappearance of which Kahn believed to be only a question of time.

The Archives of the Planet was one of a string of institutions for research and international cooperation established in Kahn’s utopian World Gardens near Paris. Some of the best-known minds of the age met there regularly in order to discuss the problem of how to make new media of communication serve the cause of peace and human development. The Cosmopolitics of the Camera presents ten expert voices from seven different countries, studying the work of Kahn and his key collaborators, the geographer Jean Brunhes and the philosopher Henri Bergson, in the spirit of their culturally diverse venture, placing it in its proper historical and intellectual context, and exploring its ambitious achievements and failures. By pushing Kahn’s work back into active discussion, the analysis forces us to reflect on the ways our world is shaped and recorded by the media, and reactivates the time capsule that Kahn designed to communicate with the future.

Introduction

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen and Trond Erik Bjorli

 

PART 1: HISTORY OF THE COLLECTION

1. The Archives of the Planet: Between Science and Action – Valérie Perlès

2. Photography, Gunpowder and Fertilizer: Albert Kahn's Norwegian Journey – Trond Erik Bjorli

3. Japan in The Archives of the Planet – Anne Sigaud

4. The Archives of the Planet and the First World War – Emmanuelle Danchin

 

PART 2: COSMOPOLITICS

5. Pacifist Photography: Seeing the Face of Humanity – Jay Winter

6. Experimental Cosmopolitanism: The Limits of Autour du Monde-ism in the Kahn Archive – Paula Amad

7. The Kahn Archive: A Visual Memory That Is Truly Cosmopolitan? – Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen and Milena Nikolova

8. The Archives of the Planet: Between Cosmopolitanism and Patriotism – Anne Sigaud

9. Henri Bergson and Albert Kahn: The Cosmopolitan Method – Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen

 

PART 3: AESTHETICS OF A WORLD ARCHIVE

10. Autochromes in Service of Human Geography: Jean Brunhes and the Aesthetics of The Archives of the Planet – Franziska Scheuer

11. Bergson's Aesthetics? Autochroming a World of Memories – Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen

12. Digital Returns: The Archives of the Planet and the 'Rhythm of Life' – Trond Lundemo

 

Postscript: The Digital Futures of Historical Media Archives – Wolfgang Ernst

 

References

Bibliography

Sujets

• 1914-1918
• Individual Photographers
• Artists' Books
• Primera Guerra Mundial
• World War I
• Cosmopolitanism
• Artist's book
• 20th century
• Photography
• Cultural Studies
• Paris
• Albert Kahn
• Henri Bergson
• Première Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789381900
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 9 Mo

Extrait

Cosmopolitics of the Camera

Cosmopolitics of the Camera
Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet
Edited by Trond Erik Bjorli and Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen
First published in the UK in 2020 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
© Signed texts, their authors
© Rest of the book, the editors
Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra SzumlasCover image: The spiral minaret of the great mosque of Samarra, Iraque, photographed 19 May 1927. Autochrome by Frèdèric Gadmer for Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète.
Albert Kahn Museum. A 54 379 S.
Frontispiece image: Original filing cabinets for autochrome plates, sorted by country. Photograph by Pascal Bedek. Archives of the Planet. Département des Hauts-de-Seine, Albert Kahn Museum.
Production manager: Mareike Wehner
Typesetter: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-189-4
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-191-7
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-190-0
To find out about all our publications, please visit our website. There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue and buy any titles that are in print.
www.intellectbooks.com
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Introduction
Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen and Trond Erik Bjorli
Part 1: History of the Collection
1. The Archives of the Planet: Between Science and Action
Valérie Perlès
2. Photography, Gunpowder and Fertilizer: Albert Kahn’s Norwegian Journey
Trond Erik Bjorli
3. Japan in The Archives of the Planet
Anne Sigaud
4. The Archives of the Planet and the First World War
Emmanuelle Danchin
Part 2: Cosmopolitics
5. Pacifist Photography: Seeing the Face of Humanity
Jay Winter
6. Experimental Cosmopolitanism: The Limits of Autour du Monde-ism in the Kahn Archive
Paula Amad
7. The Kahn Archive: A Visual Memory That Is Truly Cosmopolitan?
Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen and Milena Nikolova
8. The Archives of the Planet: Between Cosmopolitanism and Patriotism
Anne Sigaud
9. Henri Bergson and Albert Kahn: The Cosmopolitan Method
Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen
Part 3: Aesthetics of a World Archive
10. Autochromes in Service of Human Geography: Jean Brunhes and the Aesthetics of The Archives of the Planet
Franziska Scheuer
11. Bergson’s Aesthetics? Autochroming a World of Memories
Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen
12. Digital Returns: The Archives of the Planet and the ‘Rhythm of Life’
Trond Lundemo
Postscript: The Digital Futures of Historical Media Archives
Wolfgang Ernst
References
Bibliography
Introduction
Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen and Trond Erik Bjorli (Nord University, Norwegian Museum of Cultural History)
From 1909 until the early 1930s, Les Archives de la Planète documented cultural diversity in some 60 countries. Long unknown and neglected, interest in this, the world’s greatest collection of early colour photography and a unique collection of early documentary film has been growing over the last decades. A new and greatly enlarged Albert Kahn Museum, designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kumo, is opening on Kahn’s former estate in the Boulogne, a southern suburb to Paris. Since its foundation in 1986, the Kahn museum has engendered a series of publications, notably the grand collective biography Réalités d’une utopie that appeared in 1995. With the new millennium, publications in other languages than French began to appear. In his 2006 book Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century , Jay Winter highlighted Albert Kahn. The following year, the BBC released a TV-series in nine episodes, entitled Edwardians in Colour: The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn. The first and so far only scholarly monograph in English is Paula Amad’s Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète from 2010. Amad’s book deals, however, only with the film part of the archive. Cosmopolitics of the Camera is thus the first book-length scholarly presentation of the Kahn Archive in English. It results from longstanding and vivid intra-disciplinary dialogue across continents, very much in the spirit of Albert Kahn. Ten experts from seven countries discuss The Archives of the Planet, its history and intellectual context, ambitions, achievements and failures. Postcolonial studies and cosmopolitan philosophy enter into dialogue with film studies and the history of photography, and with perspectives from media archaeology and archival studies.
The Archives of the Planet contains material from the years 1909 to 1932. It was officially founded in 1912, when the human geographer Jean Brunhes was named scientific director. The collecting of material ended when Kahn lost his fortune in the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Over a period of about twenty years, Albert Kahn sent photographers to four continents. The stated purpose was ‘to gather a kind of inventory of the surface of the globe inhabited and developed by man as it presents itself at the start of the 20th Century, […] in order to fix once and for all the practices, the aspects and the modes of human activity, whose fatal disappearance is only a question of time’. 1 These are the terms used by Kahn in the letter where he offers Jean Brunhes the position as director of the archive. Truly an enticing job for a young and ambitious cultural geographer! Upon taking up the position, the geographer stated the purpose of The Archives of the Planet in his own words. It was ‘to establish what amounted to a catalogue of humanity captured in life at full, at the beginning of the 20th century, at the critical hours of one the most complete economic, geographical and historical “transformations” ever observed’. 2 The two declarations of intention display a slight difference of emphasis and understanding. Where Kahn notably wanted to document traditions that were in the process of being wiped out by modernization, Brunhes showed an interest in the process of transformation itself.
The methods of documentation were live film and the newly invented colour transparency photography, true colour slides, produced in a single shot. Filmatic movement and photography in colour were to communicate human diversity and dignity, thus serving the cosmopolitan cause. This was always a multimedia collection. In the very earliest documentations, as in those from Norway and Sweden in 1910, stereo photography was used instead of film, along with colour photography. Today, the Kahn Archive consists of 72,000 autochromes, 183,000 meters of film and 6500 stereographs. It is an archive of astonishment, collected by people who saw no contradiction between science and wonder; knowledge and imagination. It was made not only to document everyday life on a planetary scale, but also to display the élan vital of human creativity, and make the spectator marvel at its culture richness and endless creativity. The first meeting with Kahn’s material therefore offers a slight shock. A historical period that we have grown accustomed to seeing through crisp black and white photos suddenly presents itself in fully realistic and true colours. Part of this shock has to do with the qualities of the colour technology that was used. Autochromes have a lovely distinct colour reproduction. With its delicate and harmonic hue, the autochrome is considered to have been perhaps the most beautiful of colour photographic technologies. The slides have indeed withstood a century of storage very well, with little loss of freshness in the colours. Exploring the Kahn Archive is like watching a historical world anew, revived, different and yet familiar. The period in time covered is a dramatic one. Documentation started in 1909, at the highpoint of the belle époque, but the operators soon found themselves documenting the troubles on the Balkans and the disaster of the First World War, class struggle and the drama of Revolution, the intensity of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and finally the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Today, this period is known through the hundreds of thousands of black and white photographies that constitute our collective memory. An epoch comes back to us with unexpected liveliness. This triggers an afterthought concerning the ubiquity of technological mediation in modern societies. Seeing the early twentieth century through the medium of the autochrome is to see it with new eyes, an experience which carries with it a reflective insight into how every epoch and every culture is shaped by the media through which it communicates and through which it stores information about itself.
Cosmopolitanism and the Visual Media
The Kahn Archive reflects a wish for dialogue, not just among peoples in far-flung places but among eras of history. It is a time capsule, designed to communicate with an unknown future. In recent years the Kahn museum has chosen to use new technology to render its funds publicly available. Both images and texts from the archives are being digitized and uploaded in the Fakir database, where they may be consulted by researchers on site. Since 2017, a simplified low resolution version of the database is freely available on the Internet. 3 In addition an older and smaller database is available on the World Wide Web, in form of the mappemonde , where one may select autochromes and a few films by clicking on a world map. 4 The Archives of the Planet has re-emerged in digitized form, in the midst of globalization processes swifter and more intense than anything experienced in Kahn’s time.
Globalization denotes al