When we conjure up images from the period around the early twentieth century, they tend to be black and white. Yet thanks to Albert Kahn (1860-1940), color photography gained vital momentum as early as prior to the outbreak of World War I. The wealthy banker used his fortune to promote the technique of color photography invented by the Lumiere brothers and created the Les archives de la planete (Archives of the Planet): he assembled more than seventy thousand color photographs from throughout the world in order to set an example of understanding among nations on the eve of the war, thus making the foreign palpable. The volume presents one of the largest-scale photo projects of that period, equal in rank to the color photographs of the Russian Empire by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, who had been commissioned to take them by Tsar Nicholas II, or Farbenphotographien aus den deutschen Kolonien (Color Photographs from the German Colonies) published by Carl Weller in Berlin.Exhibition schedule: LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn, September 24, 2013-February 16, 2014. The exhibition at the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn marks the beginning of a series of presentations and events initiated by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland (LVR) in remembrance of the outbreak of World War I. | Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, May-July 2014 | Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, August 1-November 2, 2014

Text by: Christoph Antweiler, Rolf Sachsse, Franziska Scheuer, Thomas Schleper, Wiebke Siever, Rebekka Welker