for the first day of spring. . .
“Bouquet of lilies of the plain of Kosovo (snowdrops) . . . on a farm table — Lipljan, Kosovo, (in May, actually) 1913, by Auguste Léon, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.
This autochrome is one of about 72,000 that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker who was committed to the ideal of universal peace and believed that “knowledge of foreign cultures encourages respect and peaceful relations between nations.”* He was also acutely aware that the 20th century was going to bring rapid material change to the world.
Accordingly, from 1909 to 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.
I wasn’t able to make my own flower arrangement this week for “In a vase on Monday,”‘ but to see what other garden bloggers have created today, please visit host Cathy at Rambling in the Garden.
*Collections Albert Kahn website. Also, the above photo (A 1902) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
†words of Albert Kahn, 1912.
enclos*ure 
What a marvellous concept this – and yet how many of us have heard of Albert Kahn? I certainly hadn’t. What a delightful picture this is and thanks for sharing it with us Cindy
Hello,
I adore snowdrops but I’ve failed at my growing attempts here in San Francisco (not cold enough, perhaps?). Thank you for sharing that atmospheric photograph of them with your readers.
I enjoyed learning about Mr. Kahn and his thoughts on universal peace.