Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba, two French women, traveled to Ireland in 1913 and took what are believed
to be the first colored photographs(Autochrome) of Ireland. Not as documentarians or ethnographers, but as tourists wanting
to show what they saw, as they saw it.
Before the world was debauched by the industrial revolution, two World Wars and selfies.
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The French women were part of a world-wide project titled “The Archives of the Planet.” French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn created the project to compose a “kind of photographic inventory of the surface of the earth as it was occupied and organized by Man at the beginning of the 20th century.” His project captured some of the first color photographs taken in Ireland, the United States, Norway, Vietnam, and Brazil.
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In 1931 Kahn was forced to abandon his project due to dwindling finances after he lost a fortune in the 1929 stock market crash.
By then photographers had photographed World War I and taken 72,000 photographs from more than 50 countries.
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