Albert Kahn was a banker, philanthropist, amateur scientist, and man of action, in the Victorian mode–or rather, in the Belle Epoque mode, since he was French. He is shown above on the balcony of his bank on the Rue Richelieu in Paris in the summer of 1914. (What an evocative phrase: The summer of 1914...) This site contains highlights of Kahn's immense photographic archive, most of it in autochrome (early color) plates collected around the world, from New York to Mongolia to Angkor Wat, before the world-changing events that got started in the latter part of that golden summer.
Kahn was born in 1860, at the height of the Second Empire, and he died in 1940, under the Nazi boot. His home in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt is now the Albert Kahn museum, where his civilized vision of things, and his superb collection, reign supreme.
