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time travel I happened on the BBC series The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn and I was enchanted by the images, which illuminated and were illuminated by historians' accounts of events during the period when the photographs were taken: 1909 to 1931. As for Albert Kahn, what a man and what a life! Born in Alsace in 1860, his life was disrupted early on by the Franco-German war in 1870-71. He left home when he was 16 to work for a clothing manufacturer in Paris. By the age of 38 he had made his fortune and his reputation through a combination of personality, talent, hard work, academic studies and successful speculations in South African gold and diamond mines. He owned a house and land at Boulogne-sur-Seine, where he was creating gardens representing parts of France he loved and countries he had visited for professional purposes; he was in the process of setting up his own bank; and he had decided to devote his life and wealth to the establishment of world peace. One of his many projects in furtherance of world peace, based on his belief that knowledge of different cultures generates mutual respect, understanding and co-operation, was the creation of a photographic record of the globe, which he called Archives de la Planète. This project was broken off when his bank collapsed in the 1930s and his assets were seized. Albert Kahn, champion of universal peace, died naturally in Paris five months after the Germans marched into the city, nine months before the French police started arresting his fellow Jews. I had to visit the Albert Kahn Museum in his former home on my next trip to Paris. Via Google I obtained the address (14 rue du Port, 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt), summer opening hours (Tuesday - Sunday from 11:00 to 19:00), directions (close to metro station Boulogne Pont de Saint-Cloud), entry price (a mere one and a half euros) and details of the current exhibition "Infiniment Indes" which continues until 8 March 2009 and is described as "a dialogue with the heart and spirit of India at the beginning of the twentieth century". First I visited the gardens: the Japanese Village with its traditional house and tea-house; the English garden where, to my disappointment, walking on the grass is not allowed; the formal French garden where someone was sitting on a bench reading a book; the Vosges mini-forest; the golden forest and adjacent meadow; the marsh; the blue forest; the rose garden; and the exquisite new Japanese garden. I passed the palmarium (winter garden), but it appeared to be closed so I made no effort to go in. I would have liked a drink before carrying on, but came across no indication of any sort of eating place. I subsequently read in a newspaper article that there is - or was - a restaurant inside the palmarium. Back to the museum where I was taken on a thrilling voyage of discovery through the sub-continent, with stops at places as diverse as Lahore and Peshawar in present day Pakistan, Amritsar, Kapurthala - the Paris of Punjab, Delhi, Agra, Varanasi, Udaipur - the City of Lakes, Mumbai, and Colombo in present day Sri Lanka. I was shown luminous Indian gardens, palaces, temples, monuments, sculptures, country and street scenes. I was introduced to maharajahs, princes, priests and sadhus as well as men and women working, relaxing and performing the rituals prescribed by their different faiths. The 176 photographs in the exhibition are a tiny fraction of the collection, which consists of 4,000 stereoscopic views, 72,000 autochrome colour plates and over 100 hours of film, taken in France and 52 other countries. The whole collection is currently being loaded onto a multimedia system which can be accessed by visitors to the museum and I spent a while at a computer terminal browsing through material which is already available. A great experience which I hope to repeat. First
published in VISA 81 (Oct 2008) |