Fez, Morocco

Jardin de Dar Beïda dans le palais de Bou Jloud, Fès, Maroc, janvier 1913, (Autochrome, 9 x 12 cm), Stéphane Passet, Département des Hauts-de-Seine, musée Albert-Kahn, Archives de la Planète, A 879
“Dar Beïda [white house] garden in the Bou Jeloud Palace, Fez, Morocco,” January 1913, by Stéphane Passet, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Départment of Hauts-de-Seine.

I believe the image above was taken in what is now called the Jnane Sbil Garden — created as a royal garden in the 18th century and open to the public since the 19th. It was restored between 2006 and 2011.

This autochrome is one of about 72,000 that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to 50 countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”* The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.


*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photo (A 879) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.

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