The Albert Kahn departmental museum in France has released nearly 25,000 color photos of early 20th-century life into the public domain and over 34,000 others that are free to use as part of a project to assure visual history is not forgotten.
Stunning color images recently made available in high resolution by a French museum capture much of the world as it was transformed by technology and geopolitics 100 years ago.
Back in 1909, a super-rich French banker named Albert Kahn decided to create a photographic record of the world using the new color photography process that had just appeared, the Autochrome Lumière. He commissioned 4 photographers to take their cameras to places all over the world. One of the cities they documented was Paris.
Albert Kahn was a wealthy French banker who launched a project in the early 1909 that aimed to create a photographic record of the world. The first commercially successful color photography process, Autochrome Lumière, had just arrived two years earlier, and Kahn decided to use the medium to both document human life and to promote peace. He sent out an army of photographers to 50 different countries, amassing 72,000 photos and 100 hours (183,000 meters) of film that became one of the most important collections of images in human history.