November is Photo Month...by Adela Meadows

In Novembers of even-numbered years, Paris celebrates photography with Le Mois de la Photo. It’s a month filled with special expositions, photographic events, and lots of gallery showings…all centered on photography. This time around, Mark and I both had our photographs selected for exhibitions…he is the official photographer in the family…but after all these years, I guess a wee bit of osmosis has served to somewhat improve my efforts.

Brittany is very photogenic and was the subject of the special exhibit at a previous Salon de la Photo. But the exhibit was not about Brittany today…instead the images were wonderful early color photographs of traditionally-dressed Bretons as they went about their daily activities. The photos were intended to provide a sneak peek of an exposition that was held at the Albert Kahn Museum until July of this year.

From 1909 to 1931, Albert Kahn…a wealthy French banker and pacifist…financed an ambitious project that he called “Archives of the Planet”. His goal was to document humanity by securing color photographs of disappearing cultures spread across the four corners of the globe. Kahn’s teams of photographers traveled to over fifty different countries and eventually more than seventy-two thousand images of far-flung places were amassed.

Here is one of the images of Brittany…

…it dates from the 1920s.

Kahn’s were not the first photographs of the Brittany region. For that I have to dig into our archives and find some images that we took of an exhibit that was held in 2000 at the Musée Départemental Breton in Quimper.

Here’s a photograph of market day in Lannion in the 1850s…

…and Quimper’s rue Kéréon as it looked one hundred and sixty years ago…
 
Here’s a vintage view of the Renaissance fountain in the central square of the town of Guingamp…
…and here’s a recent photograph of that very same fountain…

Chateaubriand’s castle in Combourg then…

…and now…

An upstream view of Quimper’s Cathedrale Saint-Corentin then…

…and now…
 
Here’s what Place Saint-Corentin looked like in the 1850s…

The building in the center…Delamon Hôtel du Lion d’Or…was a prestigious hotel that also served as an agent for the coach service connecting Quimper with Brest…this photograph pre-dates the 1863 arrival of the railway to Quimper.

That same building today…

…provides inspiration for anyone who may mistakenly think that they don’t have room for any more plates!