PHOTO EXHIBITION OPENS IN FINE ART GALLERY

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia /MONTSAME/ A photo exhibition named "Mongolia through eyes of a French photographer" opens on Monday in the Fine Art Gallery, Ulaanbaatar.

Initiated by Mongolia's Ministry of Education, Culture and Education, this exhibition will last until July 1 of 2012 under auspices of the Embassy of France in Mongolia and Hauts-de-Seine Department of France to show black-and-white and color photos about Mongolian history and culture. In addition, an album with some 50 color photos, taken in 1913, and articles on Mongolia by French scholars will be presented.

Meanwhile, the Albert Kahn Museum of Hauts-de-Seine Department of France opened its exhibition named "Mongolia over a century 1912-1913" in November of 2011. It will be open until September of this year.

In 1909, a French millionaire banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn embarked on an ambitious project to create a color photographic record of, and for, the peoples of the world. As an idealist and an internationalist, Kahn believed that he could use the new autochrome process, the world's first user-friendly, true-color photographic system, to promote cross-cultural peace and understanding.

Kahn used his vast fortune to send a group of intrepid photographers to more than fifty countries around the world, often at crucial junctures in their history, when age-old cultures were on the brink of being changed forever by war and the march of twentieth-century globalization. They documented in true color the collapse of both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires; the last traditional Celtic villages in Ireland, just a few years before they were demolished; and the soldiers of the First World War--in the trenches, and as they cooked their meals and laundered their uniforms behind the lines. They took the earliest-known color photographs in countries as far apart as Vietnam and Brazil, Mongolia and Norway, Benin and the United States.

At the start of 1929 Kahn was still one of the richest men in Europe. Later that year the Wall Street Crash reduced his financial empire to rubble and in 1931 he was forced to bring his project to an end. Kahn died in 1940. His legacy, still kept at the Museum Albert-Kahn in the grounds of his estate near Paris, is now considered to be the most important collection of early color photographs in the world.

Until recently, Kahn's huge collection of 72,000 autochromes remained relatively unheard of; the vast majority of them unpublished. Now, a century after he launched his Archives of the Planet project, the BBC Book The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, and the television series it accompanies, are bringing Kahn's dazzling pictures to a mass audience for the first time and putting color into what we tend to think of as an entirely monochrome age.

B.Khuder

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