NARRAT0R..In 1908, the French financier and industrialist Albert Kahn
launched what's arguably the most ambitious enterprise
in the history of photography.
Kahn recruited a team of photographers and sent them around the world
to produce a snapshot of human life on Earth.
Drawing on his immense private fortune, Kahn supplied his team
with the most advanced photographic technology available.
They were equipped with the autochrome,
the world's first practical system capable of taking true colour photographs.
For more than two decades, Kahn dispatched his photographers
around the world.
They shot around 100 hours of film
and an astonishing 72,000 autochromes.
This vast treasury of images preserves fleeting moments
from worlds that were about to disappear.
The preservation of the Kahn archive is something of a miracle.
They give an extraordinary immediacy to the beginning of the 20th century.
In more than 50 countries,
Kahn's photographers documented the intimate details of everyday life.
They saw people at work and at play.
They recorded ancient rituals,
as well as the forces of change that threatened their survival.
And they witnessed some of the most momentous events of the age.
Kahn's cameras were present at the fall of empires,
the birth of nations, and the defining event of the era .
Europe's traumatic descent into the bloodiest war
the world had ever seen.
W0MAN: Here's a little boy holding on to his father for security
in a world that was about to be blown apart.
MAN: The eyes we see in those photographs looking back on us...
who knows how many of these people survived?
Albert Kahn's autochromes
are the world's most important collection of early colour photographs.
Together, these films and photographs cast new light
on Palestine before the creation of Israel,
Ireland in the twilight of British rule,
India at the height of the Raj,
the lives of women striving for independence,
the children of Edwardian Europe,
and the devastation of the First World War.
They show everything, from playtime in 0xford,
and performance in Cambodia,
to criminal justice, Mongolian style.
A century after Kahn embarked on this extraordinary enterprise,
his pictures offer a unique insight
into the formative years of the 20th century.
These remarkable images are a window
on the wonderful world of Albert Kahn.
At the dawn of the 20th century,
Paris was one of the most exciting cities on Earth.
For the citizens of the French capital,
it was a time of great optimism, grand ideas and global horizons.
It was the city of light.
It was the centre of fashion, of consumption,
as well as being, of course, the home of the artistic avant.garde.
(TRANSLATI0N) It's the Belle Epoque.
There's an abundance of intellectual and artistic activity in Europe,
and a sense that anything's possible.
0n the Paris Stock Exchange, fortunes were made
by those who were daring enough to seize the golden opportunities of the age.
0ne of the most successful
was the French banker and businessman, Albert Kahn.
Kahn lived in a mansion shrouded by trees
on an estate lying on the outskirts of Paris.
There, he lived a solitary life.
He never married and left no children.
Though he moved in the higher circles of the French elite,
Kahn never acquired a wider public profile.
(TRANSLATI0N) A man with this kind of wealth
would usually make more of an impression on the public.
We can only conclude that Albert Kahn
deliberately stayed behind the scenes.
In this rare piece of footage,
Albert Kahn walks through his gardens.
At the time, he was one of the richest men in Europe,
but when he died in 1940, he was virtually penniless.
Kahn's fortune had vanished,
yet he still bequeathed something of incalculable value .
a unique archive of 72,000 colour photographs,
4,000 black and white stills, and about 100 hours of film.
PR0F H0RNE: This particular archive tells an extraordinary story
about a man who wanted to see the world,
who wanted to understand it,
who wanted to use modern, rational ways of thinking
to bring about peace on a universal basis.
Albert Kahn was born in 1860
in the Alsace region of France, near its eastern border with Germany.
His family was Jewish and of relatively modest means.
Most of the Jewish community of France lived in Alsace.
Jews tended to be peddlers, they tended to be cattle merchants,
in the way that Kahn's father was,
and they were also money.lenders.
After their crushing defeat in the Franco.Prussian War of 1871,
France lost Alsace to Germany.
Almost overnight, one and a half million people
were forced to choose between French or German nationality.
Kahn's father opted to remain French.
France was seen as an emancipatory force,
as a force for an egalitarianism
in which people had the same chance for striving and success.
The young Kahn knew that he couldn't realise his ambitions in Alsace.
As soon as he was old enough,
he went to live in the Jewish Quarter of Paris.
He found work as a clerk in a private bank.
By the age of 19, he'd changed his first name from Abraham to Albert.
Many French Jews coming from Alsace would be proud and patriotic republicans.
By keeping his last name, he was announcing he was Alsatian.
By changing his first name, he was announcing he was French.
As a young trader on the financial markets,
Kahn made several risky investments in foreign enterprises.
But the deals paid off.
He made a fortune from the diamond mines of South Africa.
(TRANSLATI0N) This meant he had flair, a good eye for observing
and analysing the markets, and quite a lot of sheer nerve.
PR0F H0RNE: He was the man with the capital, the go.between,
the man who could prime pumps,
the man who could set up deals, who could explore new frontiers.
By his mid.30s,
Kahn was set to become one of the richest men in France.
But as the 19th century drew to a close,
Kahn had good reason to stay out of the limelight.
The fin de siecle was paradoxical, ambivalent.
You can see it, quote, as ''the age of progress and technical innovation''.
But there's also a very dark side to the fin de siecle,
which is anti.Semitism,
a nationalism that's having an increasingly violent edge to it.
In the 1890s, France had been plunged into crisis
by the wrongful imprisonment of the Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus,
on a trumped.up charge of spying.
The Dreyfus affair uncovered deep.seated currents of anti.Semitism
within the French military.
The case undermined everything the French Republic supposedly stood for .
the values of liberty, fraternity and equality.
Newspaper cartoons from the period show the virulent anti.Semitism
that was unleashed by the affair.
The controversy continued
until Dreyfus was finally cleared of the charges in 1906.
Kahn was as shocked as everyone was at the injustice,
but it was the attack on the Republic,
rather than the attack on Dreyfus, which was most powerful.
Albert Kahn kept a low profile during the Dreyfus affair.
But privately,
he was developing a plan that could help overcome ethnic and racial conflicts
and make the world a better place.
He'd landscaped the grounds of his Paris estate by importing plants,
soils and ornaments from all over the world.
His extensive Japanese gardens
symbolise an internationalist outlook and cosmopolitan taste.
But his worldliness didn't stop at the garden gate.
As well as cultivating gardens, Kahn believed in cultivating young minds.
Since 1898, he'd awarded generous travel grants to young people,
mostly student teachers.
The beneficiaries became members of Kahn's Around The World Society,
and they met regularly at his estate.
His generosity gave scores of young people from France, Britain,
Japan and the United States
an opportunity to experience other cultures.
Kahn knew the value of this
because he was an intrepid world traveller himself.
In the 1890s, he'd added to his fortune
during visits to another distant market .Japan.
He was always looking for the edge,
looking for that slightly riskier loan, but one with the high returns.
And given the political situation,
that was exactly the situation with the Japanese loans.
Kahn had made strong contacts among Japan's business elite,
including the ambassador to Paris, Motono Ichiro.
(TRANSLATI0N) The relationship between my grandfather Ichiro
and Albert Kahn was very powerful.
I think that my grandfather's politics was one of opening up the country.
He had a universal vision of the world
and he shared this in his relationship with Albert Kahn.
Mr Motono still remembers being photographed as a child
during visits to Kahn's holiday home in the south of France.
We went nearly every winter.
It was really a garden full of flowers.
The smell of the flowers was always in the air.
I saw Albert Kahn sometimes when he was there.
Physically, he wasn't very tall, he was medium height, always dressed in black.
He used to be alone, looking out at sea, in meditation.
Through his relationship with Motono Ichiro and other Japanese dignitaries,
he could put together deals which were of very considerable size.
Kahn maintained close relationships with his Japanese associates
throughout his life.
In the 1920s, a camera glimpsed him
in the company of members of the Japanese royal family.
Such alliances enabled Kahn to strengthen his global financial empire.
Kahn believed that international capital, international finance,
was a force for improving the world, for modernising the world,
and especially that when it was complemented by philanthropic work,
that it could be a real force for moral good.
The 1900 World Fair, held in Paris, seemed to epitomise everything Kahn believed in.
The Fair celebrated global commerce and international co.operation.
And it saluted progress in science and technology
at a time when French inventors led the world.
New machines capable of capturing reality
would also capture the imagination of Albert Kahn.
In 1895, the French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumiere
devised a way to record and project moving images onto a screen.
Their invention astounded the world
and made them famous as the fathers of cinema.
But the Lumiere brothers were also pursuing the solution
to an even more elusive problem .
the deceptively difficult challenge of producing true colour photographs.
Throughout the 19th century,
the search for colour photography was photography's Holy Grail.
There were dozens of inventors, entrepreneurs
trying to find a successful method of colour photography.
For 70 years, photographs like these had been elaborately hand.tinted,
because inventors had failed to find ways
to capture the colour constituents of light.
In 1861, the brilliant Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell,
had produced the first colour image
by projecting three separate photographs of a tartan ribbon.
The process was cumbersome and impractical.
Inventors dreamt of a method for taking colour photographs
that everyone could use.
In 1907, the Lumiere brothers announced to the world that they'd found the answer.
They'd discovered that it was possible to produce colour photographs
by staining potato starch
with three different dyes and applying the granules onto glass plates.
The Lumiere brothers called them autochromes.
Each square.inch of an autochrome plate
is covered with about four million
tiny transparent filters made from potato starch,
so what you actually see is a colour image
which is made up of millions of tiny red, green and blue dots.
The results were spectacular.
As light shone through the glass plates,
it revealed images of breathtaking beauty.
Autochromes were luminous, ethereal and dreamlike.
They captured colour exquisitely.
After so many years of frustration,
it was a stunning technological breakthrough.
You have to prick yourself to realise that what you're looking at here
is a scene which could be nearly 100 years old.
There is still a sense of the miraculous,
which almost transcends what you would normally expect from a photograph.
So they are captivating, magical images.
Back in Paris, Albert Kahn's employees
were also quick to put the new technology to good use.
As early as 0ctober 1908, one of Kahn's team
had shot the first colour images of the American aviator Wilbur Wright,
who'd been thrilling the French public by showing off his latest flying machine.
And in May 1909, Kahn himself attended a magic lantern projection in Paris,
which demonstrated the creative potential of autochromes.
The show featured the work of Jules Gervais.Courtellemont,
an Algerian.born photographer,
who'd taken his camera across North Africa,
and produced many intimate and vibrant images of life there.
When he saw Courtellemont's work,
Kahn was convinced that the autochrome was the perfect medium
for the photographic project that was now developing in his mind.
He bought some of the best pictures
and used them as a template for his Archives of The Planet.
0ver the next two decades,
the financier would send his own photographers around the world.
Their aim was to create a visual inventory of everyday life,
before the pressures of the 20th century would destroy it,
thereby promoting greater understanding of global and cultural diversity.
(TRANSLATI0N) This ambition was founded on the very simple principle
that learning to understand other cultures and people
would help diminish the risk of conflict.
So through his Archives of The Planet, Kahn brought the world here
to show what everyday life was like elsewhere.
From voodoo practitioners in West Africa...
to salmon fishermen in Ireland...
to children resting in Verona...
...and a game of chess played with human pieces at a temple festival in Vietnam,
Albert Kahn's archive is a vivid portrait of the world's collective cultural life.
He believed that by documenting, visually, the world,
it would help people develop a universal, a general knowledge,
and therefore would foster peace.
PR0F WINTER: I think there is something powerfully positivist about Kahn
that from vision can come the future.
0nly through the visual is it possible for pacifism
to have a hold on the emotions of large numbers of people.
Albert Kahn named his extraordinary photographic project
the Archive of The Planet.
It would grow to become the most important collection
of early colour photography in the world.
This collection has never been put into the state
that its creator wanted it to be.
It's never had the public profile that its creator wanted it to have.
It's like this extraordinary...sculpture that has never been fully unveiled.
Among the thousands of images, there are very few of Kahn himself.
The man whose dream it was to capture the myriad faces of humanity
always tried to elude the photographer's lens himself.
(TRANSLATI0N) Such elusiveness presents us with a paradox.
We only have around ten images of the man who was responsible for what is
the world's largest collection of early colour photographs,
and most of these shots were taken surreptitiously by his cameramen.
I think it's rather touching, when one sees these fleeting images of Kahn
at the edge of his own photographs,
one of his own cameramen who just manages surreptitiously to catch a shot of him.
He was very self.effacing.
He was the connecting spark that made things happen,
but he didn't feel that he should be part of what was happening.
In June 1909, Kahn employed his first professional photographer.
It was Auguste Leon who shot the first formally.commissioned autochrome
for Albert Kahn's Archive of The Planet.
The picture, a street scene at the Rue de la Huchette in Paris,
shows some of the limitations of the new process.
The autochrome's long exposure times meant that
anything moving in front of the lens would become a blur.
(TRANSLATI0N) This colour image which contains
a group of people is quite rare,
because it's difficult to keep so many people still in front of the camera.
To capture reality, Kahn realised that as well as preserving life in colour,
he'd need to catch the world in motion.
In its early stages, he seems to have been particularly interested in using film.
They were filming life on the street,
they were filming the social contemporary events of the day, as though they were
. separate little parcels of history. . He had an almost mystical belief
that the film camera would reveal aspects of reality
if it was used in a particular way, if it was used to catch life unawares.
From the outset, Kahn wanted to let his cameras run and run,
to capture the random flow of life.
His photographers often adopted approaches of real ingenuity.
For this shot, taken along the Boulevard des Italiens,
they mounted a hand.cranked camera in an open.top car.
This cyclist enjoys a cigarette, oblivious to the gaze of the camera.
Here, Kahn's cameraman records the human traffic frequenting a pissoir .
one of the distinctive open.air urinals that lined the streets of the city.
The Parisians are unembarrassed by the unfamiliar presence of the camera.
There is this concentration and focus and interest on contemporary everyday life
that is quite emphatic and quite new.
This notion that, you know, the history of the future
will be told from the perspective of the everyday life of today.
Kahn spared no expense in recording a world in transition.
He sent cameramen back to the same spot in front of the Arc de Triomphe
over and over again.
In 1917, at the height of the war, women in mourning appear in the frame.
By 1921, the pavements bustle with prams . evidence of the post.war baby boom.
Two years later, young women are sporting bobbed hair.
By 1925, automobiles dominate the boulevards.
Kahn's photographers would travel the world,
but some of the most compelling footage in the archive
is shot on his own doorstep.
It's not just an interest in national and racial others,
but one could also argue that it's an interest in social others,
and that there is a certain, you know,
class dimension within what's going on here, as well.
Kahn's films give us a rare insight
into all aspects of French society in the early 20th century.
Throughout history, the rural workers of Brittany had harvested seaweed
along the coast of Finistere in western France.
At the time this footage was shot in 1921, the practice was still widespread.
It continued well into the 1950s.
It was used as fuel, as a kind of fertiliser,
and as a medicinal source.
In 1928, another of Kahn's photographers, Camille Sauvageot, returned to Finistere,
but this time, his cine camera was loaded with some very early colour film.
What we're seeing there is really what the cameraman shot on the spot.
What we're not seeing,
fortunately, and this is, I think, what makes it unique,
is the film carefully trimmed and tailored to fit into a narrative.
Unlike the newsreels of the time,
which were heavily edited, Kahn's footage was kept uncut.
He wanted his films to be a historical record, so nothing was discarded.
And every subject was worthy of scrutiny . even a sleepy fishing village in Brittany.
Like Kahn, the financiers in Europe and America,
those who were concerned to transform the world,
loved comforting images of an unchanging world.
They loved peasants and what they presumed to be
the traditional unchanging nature of a rural society,
which was rapidly disappearing.
When Albert Kahn established his archive, he was aware that across the world,
many societies were likely to disappear for ever.
By the first decade of the 20th century,
eminent writers had forecast the decline and eventual disappearance
of many traditional cultures.
Kahn knew he was in a race against time.
By 1913, he was sending photographers all over the world.
0nly one of them was a woman.
In May that year, Marguerite Mespoulet
embarked on the Kahn Archive's only expedition to Ireland.
She arrived in a critical period of Irish history,
as republicans were engaged in a bitter campaign to achieve home rule.
Ireland was anything but a country at peace in 1913.
There would have been concern about the situation in Northern Ireland
and the risk of civil war.
These people are simply on the brink of what was to be a decade of violence,
out of which modern Ireland would be born.
Mespoulet was familiar with Irish culture.
She'd studied Celtic history in one of France's most distinguished universities.
Mespoulet was a particularly brilliant student in the Sorbonne.
Everything we know about Mespoulet
suggests she had a very strong presence, a very strong personality,
and I think that when she came to Ireland,
well, she brought that personality with her.
Mespoulet was intrigued by rumours suggesting that a pure Celtic community
survived in the far west of Ireland.
0n the outskirts of Galway City,
she visited a fishing village called the Claddagh.
Its existence could be traced back to before the seventh century.
By 1913, this haphazard collection of 200 tiny thatched cottages
was home to one of Ireland's last remaining Celtic communities.
It was a little outpost left of the Celtic world,
where people spoke a strange language and had their own ways,
with its own king, in the heart of, we'll say, the United Kingdom.
Throughout her three.week journey,
Marguerite Mespoulet kept a diary.
AS MESP0ULET: Although we were initially struck by just how poor and dirty
the inhabitants of the Claddagh were,
some of them live fairly happily.
The Claddagh was in serious decline.
The pictures will show grass growing,
they will show the people in very bad dress, even,
because the wealth was gone from the Claddagh.
There was no electricity at all.
They had no running water, as such. They had their own wells.
And the well was the village meeting point,
where the women of the Claddagh would clean their fish.
Mespoulet captured the Claddagh women so clearly
that they can be readily recognised today.
In that picture of the two women at the pump,
cleaning fish, one is my grandmother,
Nan 0'Toole.
They're cleaning fish.
They were just there doing theirjob when the two Frenchwomen happened on them.
Then, over a three.day period, they posed with my grandmother's shawls.
And from what I've been told, they received, um, five shillings.
The people of the Claddagh made their living from fishing.
When the men returned from sea,
the women would sell the catch in Galway City's fishmarket square.
Often times, they used to have the baskets on their heads to bring them over.
I remember as a kid growing up here, I remember
the Claddagh people shouting, ''Fresh fish! Fresh fish!'' early in the morning.
The women literally ran the village
because they had access to the money.
When they sold the fish, they had, if you like,
the revenue literally in their pocket.
AS MESP0ULET: These women are some of the wildest that you could meet.
We had to use gentleness and cunning
in order to get them to stay still
for eight to ten seconds in front of the camera lens.
They would have been maybe shy of the camera.
To pose for a photograph, they might have found it funny.
They were shy. That's what they were.
This picture, painted in 1841 by the Irish artist Frederick Burton,
is thought to be set in a Claddagh cottage.
Artists have long been captivated
by the vivid red clothes worn by women in the west of Ireland.
It was a colour that Mespoulet wanted to preserve in her autochromes.
AS MESP0ULET: We were very fortunate
to get hold of a rare example of this very beautiful costume.
The colour itself is so extraordinary, it kind of sucks you into it.
It's not just red, it's not just crimson,
it's not just the colour of blood, it's all of that together.
Here you have these peasant women in the west of Ireland having no problem at all
wearing the most extraordinary kind of hallucinating colour.
AS MESP0ULET: The young girl who posed for these photographs
is regarded in Galway as one of the most perfect examples of an Irish colleen.
NARRAT0R: The perfect Irish colleen in Mespoulet's picture
was 14.year.old Mian Kelly.
Mian was my grandmother's eldest daughter
and she went everywhere with my grandmother,
and worked with her, as well.
I remember her being a fine lump of a woman,
very strong.
Mian was the kind of woman who liked a laugh
and to kid around, and she was just a very, very jolly woman.
NARRAT0R: For centuries, the fishermen of the Claddagh
had used traditional wooden boats.
But by 1913, they were being forced out of business by modern trawlers.
The livelihood of the villagers was under threat.
Within a few years, Galway City would be modernised,
and the thatched cottages of the Claddagh
would be deemed unfit for human habitation.
By the mid.1930s, they'd been torn down and replaced by council houses.
When they started to demolish the Claddagh,
they eradicated a way of life that went back
possibly to Celtic times and even further.
I think these photographs are very important,
because they show the beginning of the end
of a once.proud colony, a way of life that disappeared within two decades,
and I think Ireland is the poorer for that.
Marguerite Mespoulet travelled on through the county of Galway.
She committed to her diary
poignant descriptions of the people she found there.
AS MESP0ULET: This woman makes her living as a fringe.maker.
It takes her three days to make each one.
''If I didn't have to look after the nippers,''she said,
''I could perhaps do one every two days,
''but there are seven children in the house.''
The gaunt faces of the women who, by their own admission,
have too many children and too much work, um, that's brought out in colour.
It couldn't be brought out in black and white.
NARRAT0R: As Mespoulet discovered,
poor communities enduring such difficult conditions
were particularly prone to disease.
AS MESP0ULET: A little to the north of the place where this house was photographed,
people are dying like flies, of typhoid fever.
NARRAT0R: For many decades, Ireland's population had been in steep decline.
About one million people had died during the potato famine of the 1840s.
Mass migration had robbed the country of up to two million more.
AS MESP0ULET: There is hardly a single village
where you don't find several of these mournful skeletons
of little grey houses, taken over by nettles.
The shots of the empty houses are moving testimony
to the continued scourge of emigration in Ireland.
DR NEVILLE: At the start of the 20th century,
emigration was such a fact of life.
It was everywhere, and particularly from the west of Ireland.
NARRAT0R: Throughout her Irish odyssey,
Mespoulet met people who were about to plunge into a period of great uncertainty.
The part of the photo that really intrigues me is the little boy.
Here's a little boy holding on to his father for security
in a world that was about to be blown apart.
And I wonder about somebody like that in 1913.
He looks like a little boy of maybe six or seven.
What happened to him later?
Did he survive the various wars, the various political catastrophes?
Did he emigrate, like so many people from that community would have done?
For those who decided to stay, prospects were bleak.
Many were forced to take backbreaking work on the land, including peat.digging.
Even when they're cutting turf and so on, she says, ''These people speak like poets.''
So there's a kind of nobility. These are noble people.
AS MESP0ULET: He works alone, under the sky,
his feet in water, with just the birds and the clouds for company.
It's easy to understand how these people
have such vivid and passionate imaginations,
and were able to construct the most beautiful legends in the whole of Europe.
NARRAT0R: Mespoulet's 73 autochromes
were among the earliest.known colour photographs of Ireland.
When she returned to France, they were added to Kahn's Archive of The Planet.
Kahn himself must have been extremely pleased with these images,
because the images and the diary fit exactly into his ambition,
which was to show people how people lived elsewhere,
that dignity and nobility could be found
in the most surprising places.
Nine weeks after Mespoulet returned,
Albert Kahn sent another mission to the British Isles.
At the end of the summer of 1913, he travelled to Cornwall
in the company of one of his photographers, Auguste Leon.
At the time, the north coast of Cornwall
was about to become a popular tourist destination.
But Kahn had already bought a holiday home there .
a seafront villa at Carbis Bay, near St Ives.
There, Leon photographed some of Kahn's guests on the lawns overlooking the bay.
PR0F H0RNE: He became fascinated by the Cornish landscape, and by the coast.
I think that Kahn clearly saw that this was something which could
become a centre of tourism, a desirable location in the future.
Business reasons might also explain Kahn's decision
to acquire a home in Cornwall.
For a man who was an expert in mining, given the revival of Cornish tin.mining
in the years before the First World War,
it would be logical for him to have a speculative interest
in acquiring a Cornish tin mine.
But in 1913, the main purpose of the trip was to photograph the people of Cornwall.
Just down the road from Carbis Bay,
Leon encountered women selling mineral water
to tourists who were exploring the coastline.
The source of the mineral water is still there,
but much of what Leon shot has long since disappeared.
He also witnessed a boy leading a donkey to work...
...a farmer posing at his paddock...
...women and children in their Sunday best...
...and a young man resting on an aqueduct that drains water from a tin mine.
The great excitement of discovering the autochromes
is that these are not only the first colour photographs of any kind,
as far as we know, ever taken in Cornwall,
they are very high quality.
Along with everything else, it marks out Kahn as a pioneer, a philosopher.
During the summer months,
the people of Cornwall worked the land, using work horses and haywains.
It was a kind of wilful, nostalgic view of the landscape.
This was something that they knew industry, progress, was going to change,
and they were going to lose it.
PR0F H0RNE: With the demise of mining in the latter part of the 19th century,
the importance of the small farmer,
of a kind of peasantry, of smallholding farming,
was the mainstay of the Cornish economy,
and I think that that is represented in this photograph.
Along the coast at St Ives,
Leon found a town that, for centuries, had relied on fishing.
But by 1913, the once.plentiful stocks of pilchards were already in decline.
In the back streets, houses were becoming run down,
and children often went barefoot.
Today, these cottages sell to holidaymakers
for up to half a million pounds.
Most of the people in Leon's Cornish autochromes are long gone,
including the ancestors of one.time resident, George Farrell.
GE0RGE FARRELL: The lady in it is my grandmother.
The house that she's standing in was an old inn called the Labour In Vain.
Quite an historic pub in its time. Apart from that,
it was like a lot of pubs, I suppose he done a bit of smuggling on the side,
everybody did in Cornwall.
It's what they call free trade in Cornwall!
The sea gave a livelihood to many Cornish families.
But its support was fickle, and it offered a perilous life.
ALIS0N BEVAN: When you look at that old salt leaning against the wall,
I mean, he's perfectly happy and he's there in his retirement,
but so many of his contemporaries would have been lost at sea.
There were disasters all the time.
Leon's pictures provide a glimpse of Cornwall
before the last, peaceful chapters of the Edwardian era
came to an abrupt and violent end.
1913 is a year that always makes you think, ''What happened next?''
Because we know, we have the benefit of hindsight.
You can't help but look at some of those young people and think, ''I wonder...''
At the end of August 1913,
Kahn and Leon left Cornwall and headed for France.
But just two days later, Leon boarded a boat train and returned to Britain.
This time he was heading for London,
to record life in the capital of the British Empire.
It's the splendour, the majesty of Edwardian London
as the centre of Empire which is predominant.
He photographed the Palace of Westminster,
this wonderful Gothic edifice which represented the Mother of the Parliaments.
He photographed the Royal Courts of Justice .
so that the rule of law was also part of what the Empire was seen as standing for.
0utside Buckingham Palace,
the memorial to Queen Victoria was just two years old.
It features a gilded representation of Victory,
which tops a white marble statue of Victoria herself,
surrounded by the angels of Charity, Truth and Justice.
PR0F H0RNE: This isn't just any statue of Queen Victoria.
This is the memorial which is to commemorate the life of the Queen Empress,
the person under whom the British Empire had,
in effect, been created in its modern form.
London was still a city of heavy industry.
The smog from its factories and the bustle on its streets
dictated when and where Leon could shoot his autochromes.
If people did move whilst you were taking the exposure,
you would end up with a ghostly, shadow image.
What you would have to do is perhaps work early in the morning
when the streets were quiet.
Below St Paul's, Ludgate Hill may look empty
but those ghostly smears are Londoners rushing to work.
(TRANSLATI0N) These images with blurring are relatively rare in the collection.
The photographers avoided them.
But, today, they have a particular value
because they show us the challenges the photographers faced.
In the years ahead, the lives of the Britons in Leon's autochromes
would be shattered by war, upheaval and loss.
His pictures capture in colour a world that would never be the same again.
C0LIN HARDING: With hindsight, when you look at these photographs,
there's always an air of poignancy,
where you realise that what we're looking at here
is the final glowing embers, as it were,
of British society before the First World War,
and you wonder what happened to these people, their friends and relatives.
Certainly it was a world that was to disappear for ever in the mud of France.
For more than two decades, Kahn's films and autochromes
would chronicle the changing life and volatile times
of peoples all over the world.
It is a multimedia archive. We see this tension between the direct,
you know, ability to capture movement and motion within the film
and the more static, the more aesthetic dimensions of the autochrome collection.
PR0F WINTER: What I think we find in Kahn's collection
is a unique moment when both photography and cinematography
could have the capacity to reach a world
that is in process of vanishing in front of our eyes.
(TRANSLATI0N) It's a unique testimony, and the more time passes,
the more important the testimony becomes.
Together, Kahn and his photographers
created one of the world's most important visual archives.
The images they produced offer us unique insights into the vital,
formative years of the 20th century.
Kahn's Archive of The Planet is a storehouse of images
that celebrates humanity in all its diversity.
Its films capture fleeting moments from a lost age...
...and its astonishing photographs allow us to glimpse lives lived a century ago,
all over the world,
in radiant colour.