“The World ca. 1914 – Color Photography before the Great War” is a new exhibition in Berlin showing color photographs from Europe, Asia and Africa during the turn of the 19/20^th century up to 1914, the year of the break-out of World War I.

The collection is from Albert Kahn (1860 – 1940), a French banker who was fascinated by the Lumière Brothers photography process and who desired global peace in a time of political and economical insecurities, assigned several photographers to take pictures of people and landscapes around the world and compile a photo archive of more than 70.000 pictures called “Archives of the Planet”.

What the photographers’ eyes saw and what their cameras eternalized, is a compilation of fascinating pictures in color quality, and an impressive historical document of people, cultures, traditions, and close-up moments of everyday life. The images were taken in Europe, Asia and Africa, e.g. China, Egypt, Turkey, India, Austria, Germany, Russia and Serbia.

Kahn was especially fascinated by Asia since a journey to Japan in 1906. Hence, he sent the photographer Stéphane Passet to the Far East, along the Southern Silk Road – from China to Mongolia, and then to India and Pakistan and Turkey. In these countries more than in others, Albert Kahn was interested in photos that depicted religious topics.

The extraordinary exhibition also presents photographs and projections by Adolf Miethe (1862 – 1927) and Sergei M. Prokudin-Gorskii (1863 – 1944).