ABSTRACT
How lens-based media have confronted the task of recording disappearance, often via ruinous imagery, is the subject of this chapter. I first explore Albert Kahn’s Les Archives de la Planète (Archives of the Planet, 1909–1931), a multimedia project whose raison-d’être was the capturing of disappearing realities owing to a sweeping global modernisation. Yet disappearance appears in another, equally significant guise in Kahn’s Archive, which contains one of the most exhaustive collections of warfare destruction, as well as films of natural calamities, thus cementing a conception of planetary time as unpredictable rupture. These considerations provide the backdrop for my analysis of contemporary works interested in archiving the planet for a nonhuman future, including Geyrhalter’s hybrid fiction-documentary Homo Sapiens (2016) and Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures (2012) project.
