Revisiting the Kahn collection: multimodal artificial intelligence and visual patterns of presence and absence in the Archives de la Planète, 1909–1931

Financed by the French banker Albert Kahn, the Archives of the Planet is one of the most important collections of early photography. Produced between 1909 and 1931, its 72,000 autochromes show a world we are accustomed to seeing in black and white, captured in colour. While Kahn focused on volume, scholars have mostly studied the collection by close reading a small number of pictures. In contrast, this article applies a distant viewing methodology – a combination of data analysis and multimodal AI – to examine, compare, and analyse all the thousands of pictures in the Archives of the Planet. Using spatial metadata, it reveals that the world represented by the collection is significantly smaller than previously assumed: only 22 countries appear more than 100 times in the archive. Applying multimodal AI reveals that a large proportion of the archive (∼25%) consists of the same or extremely similar images. Challenging previous claims about the collection's heterogeneity, algorithmic clustering of the images demonstrates that Kahn's photographers captured similar scenes, adhering closely to the scientific principles of the project. On a general level, the article demonstrates that a distant viewing methodology can help find patterns of presence as well as patterns of absence: the silent parts of the archive.