Musée Albert-Kahn

The Musee departemental Albert-Kahn in Boulogne-Billancourt combines a photographic archive with a themed garden on four hectares just west of Paris. Between 1909 and 1931 banker Albert Kahn sent operators with autochrome plates into roughly 50 countries to record a world he saw vanishing; the Archives de la Planete contain about 72,000 colour plates and 183,000 metres of film. The garden strings together a Japanese garden, a French parterre, an English landscape park and a Vosges forest, each section a miniature of a region. After a multi-year renovation with a new building by Kengo Kuma, the site reopened in 2022 and shows large-format projections of some of the earliest colour photographs on earth.