Extra Credit: A Vanishing World in Autochrome

In doing my research for “A Vanishing World in Autochrome”, I spent an ungodly amount of time browsing the Albert Kahn archives. I was fascinated with the colorful views from all different corners of the world, with how familiar with gazes of the subjects felt from a century away. As a history enthusiast (and a Cancer), I admittedly got a little carried away.

Things took on the air of a forensic investigation for a minute, with me zooming into every detail to try and learn a little more about the world Albert Kahn was so desperate to preserve. Compulsively, I saved an exorbitant amount of images, unsure which ones I would have the chance to share in my article. In the interest of brevity (even though I don’t think I’ll ever write something within Substack’s email limit) I was only able to include a select few. Tragic.

The images, available publicly here, are all worth getting lost in, but to save you the trouble of navigating the vast collection (and dealing with the website’s slightly annoying interface), I’ve compiled a few of the most striking images from the Archives of the Planet below as a perk for paying subscribers, sorted according to their expedition.

Note: There are a ton of pictures in this post and you likely won’t be able to see them all in your inbox—head to the Substack site or app and view everything in full.

Thank you for your continued support, enjoy!

While the horrifically bloody battle of the Somme raged on just a train ride away, Archives de la Planète photographers Jean Brunhes, Auguste Léon, and Georges Chevalier captured these photos from various French provinces during the summer of 1916. Though many of the images feel like scenes from a storybook, some hint at the massive displacement, economic strain, and civilian suffering that global war had caused.

Under French colonial rule, communities in Indochina were feeling the burden of the First World War from thousands of miles away. Local workers and soldiers were being forced into recruitment to support the war effort, and as such, anti-French sentiment was at an all time high. Cultural pride flourished in spite of the colonial government’s attempts to repress it. As 1914 drifted into 1915, Lèon Busy traveled to the area and captured some of the most colorful images in the Kahn collection.