The Unknown Innovator Of Colour Photography?

by charlieatkinson on May 31, 2012

1x1.trans The Unknown Innovator Of Colour Photography?

1x1.trans The Unknown Innovator Of Colour Photography?

(Above Image Copyrighted by Musee Albert Kahn)

Albert Khan was a french banker and one of the richest men in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. He set out on an ambitious project to document the people of the world, for the people of the world. He ended up with a collection of roughly 72,000 color autochromes taken from 1908 – 1931. Because they are wet plates they were extremely hard to reproduce and share the work in its true beauty.

Check out the bookhere. There are also a couple of parts of the documentary by the BBC floating around YouTube which are definitely worth a watch.

Thanks to Rich Bowen for telling me about this, it blew my mind as some of these people in the photos where born in the 19th century!

  • Guest

    No biggie, but he started his project of documenting the world in colour at the beginning of the 20th century (not 19th) and some of the people in the shots would be from the 19th century.

    • http://www.charlieatkinson.blog.com/ Charlie Atkinson

      My bad! will change it now, thank your for pointing it out!

      • Yo

        Why show case a Frenchy? Check out the Vivian Maier.

        • Rodger

          Maier is over-hyped

          • Yo

            Highly intelligent. I guess you have no sense of history or understanding of the importance of the Maier collection! Put your stuff up here…

          • Rodger

            Personal attacks with no refutation of my claim, as well as an “Well, if you don’t know, then you never will” – stay classy

        • DB

          Why not?

          Why then showcase an american photographer instead? 

          sigh…

  • Scarlet_Billows

    What is an “innovativer”? And what does “at the begging of the 20th century” mean? It should be “its” in “share the work in it’s true beauty”

    Proof read prior to posting.

  • a

    hey, the first inventor of the colour photography was a Pole, Jan Szczepanik. Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Szczepanik and so on http://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plik:Jan_Szczepanik_-_photographic_paper.jpg&filetimestamp=20080404065439 . He invented also colorimetr, colour films and some other bunch of significant technics. Today he became almost unknown, because of ingorancy and arogancy of the western and american societies. If he’d been american, french or english, he would be famoust. Heh.

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