How to Take 72,000 Travel Photos in 1908
It’s 1908 and you’ve just become a French millionaire banker speculating on the stock market. What do you do? Build yourself a nice villa along the French Riviera? Become the socialite of your time, hosting lavish parties for your new wealthy friends? Or are you Albert Kahn; the great traveler of your time.
Taking over 72,000 photos of his travels and those of his colleagues, he created this collection with the purpose of recording human cultures around the world which were rapidly disappearing. His collection, The Archives of the Planet, contained over 183,000 meters of film in 50 countries varying from Mongolia to Serbia, and they were highly varied in content.
We talk about travel generally in the present tense; what we aspire to do and how to do it but today, we should travel back in time exploring the remarkable pictures he and his colleagues left us to marvel at. As there are so many countries explored, so many cultures observed, so many portraits taken, so many landmarks seen, I will try my best to find the highlights, their stories, and the people in them. After all, that is what tourism is largely about; culture, people, and places.
This is perhaps one of the most fascinating, archaic photos of the collection; next to one another, in the traditional garb of the British Raj, a Brahmin (the highest caste in traditional Hindu society) and a Sadhu (a religious ascetic/ holy man) are photographed.
The Brahmin (on the right) is dressed in white, according to the Laws of Manu (a Hindu text) whilst the Sadhu (left), living a monastic life, left his beard growing and wore aged sarong clothing (as monks were meant to own few possessions and grow dreadlocks called jata).
It was taken in Lahore, Pakistan, making it all the more remarkable. The Partition in 1947 destroyed the Hindu community of Pakistan, as they mostly left for modern India.
The picture was taken by Leon Busy, commissioned by Albert Kahn in 1921 to travel to what was then French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam and Cambodia) to photograph the life of the people there.
The photo, taken in the ‘Temple of Literature’ depicts Buddhist monks worshipping their village god. As monks, their daily activities included wrestling; here, they are praying before a wrestling match. The Temple hosted the first university of Vietnam — the Imperial Academy. Funny enough, this Temple is now on Vietnamese banknotes (on the back of the 100,000 Vietnamese dong banknote). These were the first-ever colored pictures of Hanoi.
Back when France had a large empire, soldiers from across the empire served in the colonial army. In Senegal, there were the Senegalese ‘tirailleurs’ (snipers) of whom over 200,000 served in WW1. The uniform they wore was in the ‘zouaves’ style with a fez (which was previously the national headdress in most areas of North Africa). The man above was serving at the time (1914) in Fez, Morocco. Sadly, the word ‘zouaves’ in French now means ‘clown’ so not quite the same!
This photograph is the most tragic of the photos I will describe.
Here, a Mongolian woman is sentenced to death by starvation through live entombment. In the Mongolian steppe, she is left to beg for food and is left a bowl of water on the ground. The photographer, Stephane Passet, could not intervene as it would go against anthropologists' rule not to intervene in another culture’s order system. This depicts the barbarity of prison systems in many places across the world at the onset of the 20th century.
Note the swastika next to the lock on the top.
Albert Kahn, himself an Alsatian Jew, has, in his collection, had a photo of Jewish shops in Vienna on the eve of WW1. This one may seem more mundane, a European street lined with shops but it depicts a bygone way of life. 175,000 Jews once resided in the streets of Vienna, often Hasidic Jews and now, after decades of persecution, there remains only 6,500. In the photo, is a bookstore that sold Jewish literature and if I discern correctly, at the entrance to this bookstore, there are two talits (Jewish prayer shawls).
Now here’s a quick and fun one. Can anyone guess who it is? (Maybe write it in the comments first).
It is… Winner of the 1913 Nobel Literature Prize, Bengali playwright, painter and composer, Rabarinth Tagore. Sadly, his Nobel Prize was stolen in 2004 but what remains are his literary masterpieces and of course, photos of him. Tagore in the photo is in Paris in the gardens of Albert Kahn. In fact, tourists of today can visit his beautiful Japanese/French gardens and photography collection in Paris au Musee Albert Kahn.
The world is clearly not fully globalized yet in the 1910s. The Swedish couple above have just been married and whilst the bride is wearing traditional Swedish attire (the color white for weddings originates from Queen Victoria), the man has now transitioned to a modern three piece suit. Albert Kahn’s goal was precisely to photograph the world before it became excessively globalised and luckily he did.
Now I’ll just show pictures and I’ll caption them because they’re so fascinating and there are so many.
The final picture. Two monks looking out onto the Mongolian steppes. I wonder what they’re discussing…
