Picture Perfect

In a passage in his Discourse on Method that echoes the first lines of the Odyssey, Descartes describes passing his youth “visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it.”

Descartes called this studying the “great book of the world.” At the turn of the 20th century, a well-to-do Frenchman with that same gallic fixation on systematizing decided to create his own great book of the world, bankrolling photographers to travel the world to document cultures and civilizations from China to Cambodia using the spanking new technology of color film.

That man, about whom we hear a great deal in this occasionally apple-polishing volume, is Albert Kahn. The project he undertook is known as the Archives of the Planet. “Is” because the archives still exist, at Kahn’s former estate in Boulogne-Billancourt just outside the Paris périphérique, where Kahn lived out his days, expiring in 1940 shortly after the arrival of German troops.

Kahn’s hope had been to create a contribution to human knowledge, but also to mutual understanding, and eventually to world peace. In a sort of cosmic joke, this philanthropist and pacifist embarked on his quest shortly before the outbreak of the Great War and widespread upheaval in the Middle East.

He commissioned photographers (opérateurs) over a period of two decades, sending them off to remote corners of the world, weighted down with hundreds of pounds of photographic apparatus, to tangle with larcenous customs officials and vexatious colonial overseers. The British in China come in for special mention.

What his photographers accomplished is remarkable. First, their photographs, or “autochromes,” are genuinely beautiful. The autochrome process used large sheets of film covered with tens of millions of grains of dyed potato starch, an improbable system that nevertheless yielded beautiful reds and greens.

Second, his photographers went everywhere. Not just obvious waypoints like Beijing but also Mongolia and Cambodia. Not just New York and Montreal, but also Niagara Falls and Calgary. Not just Baghdad (where they photographed Armenian orphans produced in numbers by the 1915 genocide), but also clerics in Najaf, Kurds in Zakho, and mullahs in Shiraz. A schoolyard in Hamadan, in latter-day Iran, overflows with Jewish schoolgirls.

The opérateurs made it to Cairo and the pyramids of Giza, but also to more challenging destinations such as Aleppo and Hama. The accomplishment is all the more amazing in that they did it all with cameras the size of an Easter ham and slower to reload than a flintlock rifle.

In the Bekaa Valley, Kahn’s photo- graphers captured British soldiers preparing to relinquish their responsibilities to the French, who had picked up new mandates in Lebanon and Syria at Versailles. For their part, the British were heading off to assume new mandates in Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan. In this, as in so many other instances in this volume, Kahn’s photographers have stumbled onto a historical pivot point, the sort of innocent but pregnant image that reminds one of nothing so much as the third-grade class pictures of a serial killer. (It only looks like a bunch of British soldiers milling around on a dusty road.)

Photography may be low art to some, but it has an edge on writing in the truth-telling department. Thucydides wrote of the Thracians “bursting into Mycalessus” during the Peloponnesian War, and “sparing neither youth nor age but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and women, and even beasts of burden.” Thucydides intended his book to be “a monument for all time,” and indeed it is, but Albert Kahn has pictures. His photographer Frédéric Gadmer was on hand to document the aftermath of the sack of Smyrna, with the loss of 120,000 souls. Photographs such as those taken by Gadmer of the comprehensive devastation visited on that ancient Mediterranean city by the Turks have a credibility that written accounts of other atrocities necessarily lack.

Kahn’s opérateurs were present at so many other critical moments. In author David Okefuna’s words:

They also witnessed the beginning of Iraq’s oil economy. In the main, they witnessed the unwinding of the Ottoman Empire.

You can hardly read this collection without being conscious of the remarkable research effort involved in bringing together hundreds of thinly documented photos and attempting to write informative captions for each. One wonders how long it took the author to figure out that a particular building in Venice would later become a hotel and play host to Ernest Hemingway, or that the costume of one Swedish woman marks her as a denizen of Rättvik, not nearby Leksand, or that the indigenous Sami women of Lapland began to wear more colorful clothes in the 19th century with the advent of cheaper dyes.

The author introduces each part of the world with a concise essay, making the overall effect somewhat like an endless (but interesting) National Geographic article, or Robert Flaherty film set down on paper. As with National Geographic, the writing is good but sometimes veers into U.N.-speak, as when the author praises the work of photographer Frédéric Gadmer in the proud and ancient African kingdom of Dahomey: “[These photographs] bequeath an unswervingly candid yet consistently sympathetic picture of African life at a time when corrosively racist mythologies that denied the humanity of Africans were colonizing the mental environment of the West.”

Even today, color photography is not for everyone, and the past, as is well known, happened in black and white, even the recent past: Nobody wants to see a color shot of Buddy Holly on their CD or color footage of James Meredith grimacing in pain after being shot on Highway 51. This lends many of Kahn’s images a vaguely unsettling quality, especially images likely to resonate with Western readers such as the destruction of Reims, or aviators preparing to take their biplane on a surveillance mission over the Somme.

This is a book less about photography than about a kindly philanthropist who set out to increase human understanding and found, instead, war and rumors of war.

James F.X. O’Gara is a Washington-based photographer whose most recent exhibit was of migrant workers in Cairo’s Manshiet Nasr neighborhood.