An early 20th-century colour photography project failed to secure world peace, but it left vivid images of Galway and a terrific portrait of pre-war Europe, writes Lorna Siggins

"The young men leave for North America, the young women too and when the old people die the house is abandoned and falls into ruin. There is hardly a village where one doesn't find forlorn skeletons of small grey houses invaded by nettles. All the efforts of the Agricultural Organisation Society and the Congested Districts Board will be needed to heap on the land all the children it desperately needs so as not to die . . "

- Marguerite Mespoulet, May 1913

Ireland, 1913: the year of Home Rule and the Dublin lock-out, the discovery of Scott's death in Antarctica, suffragette protests in Britain, and the first flight across the Mediterranean. Out in Connemara, two young women are preoccupied with poverty, light and landscape, as they haul heavy equipment through the county on a slow journey east.

Their mission? To capture the spirit of a society as part of an ambitious photographic archive aimed at nurturing world peace, on the eve of the devastating first World War.

What the residents of those "small grey houses" west of Galway thought of Marguerite Mespoulet and her companion is anyone's guess, but their financial backer, Parisian banker Albert Kahn, and his associates, had full confidence in their ability to deliver. The two women were among a group sent to every continent to record images using the first colour photography, autochrome plates.

Some 72,000 colour photographs and 183,000m of film were collected by the photographic team between 1909 and 1931 for a historical adventure known as the Archives of the Planet. Now acknowledged as the most important collection of early colour photographs on the globe, it was spearheaded by Kahn just a year after French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière had developed the autochrome to commercial level.

This was the world's first "user-friendly photographic system", equipped also for colour. Kahn had bought one almost immediately, according to Fidelma Mullane, geographer and guest curator of a new exhibition of the archive's Irish images in Galway City Museum. The autochrome system of starch filters on glass plates produced "images of mesmerising beauty", and as an avowed pacifist Kahn believed he could employ the technology to nurture greater understanding among peoples.

For 20 years, he spent vast sums on hiring and dispatching photographers to more than 50 countries, ranging from Vietnam to Mongolia, Norway to Japan - all of this in an age of no airlines, let alone low-cost ones. The fact that the photographers landed at "crucial junctures" was no accident, for they had been carefully selected by the Archives of the Planet administration.

Collapsing empires, such as the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman, were captured, while the cameras were also there to record the birth of new nation states in Europe and the Middle East. Soldiers cooking meals and washing uniforms behind the front lines at the battle of Verdun in France contrast with the movers and shakers carving up Europe in Versailles.

Donkey carts outside a forge in Drogheda, Co Louth, a coracle on the Boyne, and fish sellers in thatched houses in Galway's Claddagh were among the images captured by Marguerite Mespoulet and her companion, Madeleine Mignon-Alba, during their sojourn in Ireland. The two women, both in their 30s, were graduates in English and mathematics respectively, and were not trained photographers, but met at one of Kahn's Around the World circle gatherings in Paris.

Mespoulet, a teacher who took first place in France in advanced English studies in 1905, had already secured a fellowship from Kahn in 1907 to go to Japan. Similarly, Mignon-Alba (then Mignon) had been on a Kahn fellowship, in 1911, to Europe and North America, and also to Egypt. Mullane says that the genesis of their Irish journey isn't clear, but they began on the west coast and moved east.

Their collection, which has been loaned to Galway City Museum by the Musée Albert-Kahn in Paris, can be identified in four stages, starting with Galway city and county. The Claddagh was then "a small fishing village at the gates of Galway, which is curiously reminiscent of some villages in lower Brittany", Mespoulet wrote in a travel journal translated by Mullane. And "even though one is first struck by the misery and filth of its inhabitants, some live here happily enough - that is to say in relative comfort - but the children are never cleaner than the poor little ones we see here, infected with ringworm", she continued.

"Little by little, the directors of the Congested Districts Board are buying the land and building bigger and healthier houses. The village is therefore destined to disappear some day," she noted with great foresight.

Out in Headford, they captured a cottage in a flowering bog. "When Ireland is not a brilliant emerald land, sparkling and fresh, it is a dark country of brown bogs on which the heavy grey sky leans. But in May and June, the bog flowers; the gorse and the white flowers of the marsh open and turn the bog into a festive place." Back west in Spiddal, she noted that a woman spinning with her "primitive wheel" was now a very rare sight in south Connemara, as women preferred to go and work in homespun factories.

"For two days, gusts of wind come every five minutes and the two of us are obliged to hold the foot of the camera during exposure," she also wrote in June, 1913, when they had reached Drogheda, Co Louth. It was one of many references to their struggles with the weather. At this point, they were endeavouring to photograph a cartwright and his assistant at work in a forge. "One sees here how simple the ploughing implements still are in Ireland, even in the East, which is the 'developed' part of the country," Mespoulet wrote.

On the river Boyne near Slane, Co Meath, they photographed one of the last remaining coracles. "There are only four of these small boats remaining in the East," Mespoulet observed. "They are made as they were at the time of St Patrick: a light frame of hazel branches covered with cow hide. To steer them, one uses one very small oar, making figures of eight in the water. The man in one of the boats is a fisherman who uses it constantly."

CURATOR FIDELMA MULLANE says that the exhibition must be viewed in the context of developments within the discipline of geography in France. "At the beginning of the 20th century, French geographers were defining the science of geography in terms of the interaction between people and environment. This new approach to understanding the environment, defined by Paul Vidal de la Blache, and later Jean Brunhes, as human geography, was based on the idea of milieu and genres de vie," she says. "Milieu consisted of the physical environment, while genres de vie implied the way in which different peoples interacted with the natural environment. The geographer, by observing and analysing the patterns of human activities, such as the types of agriculture, house types, settlement patterns and social structures, could define cultural and geographical areas.

"In 1912, Jean Brunhes become the first professor of geography at Collège de France, a chair endowed by Albert Kahn. Brunhes also became director of the Archives of the Planet," she says.

"Looking at the photographs taken in Ireland in 1913, we can see that the logic of the choice and method of photographing was profoundly influenced by Brunhes's ideas," she continues. "Almost all the photographs are taken in rural areas, Galway city being the only city that was photographed. Even here the images have a distinctly rural feel, with the documenting of the cattle fair, the photographing of craft and trading, such as selling fish, making fringes for shawls and the illustration of what was accepted as the most traditional part - the Claddagh."

In those Claddagh photographs, one can identify the influences, and the emphasis on "moving from the context to the detail, from the general to the specific", Mullane says. So the photographers began with the overall context, then focused on a part of the Claddagh settlement, and then took some examples of the houses with inhabitants, followed by detail of the former traditional dress, including the strikingly rich red cloaks, and shots of economic and craft activities, such as selling fish and making fringes for shawls.

As Mullane notes in her introduction to the exhibition, the sensitivity of the two women - members of the sole female-only project for the archive - is evident through the images and words, which convey a sense of "witnessing the end of a world, what remains of 'things from a past time', from an Ireland on the verge of profound political upheaval". Kahn's world vision, his experience of three wars, his profound pacifism and his philanthropic activities are essential to understanding the nature of the exercise. His Archives of the Planet was a "kind of photographic inventory of the surface of the globe as it was occupied and organised by Man at the beginning of the 20th century", Mullane says.

Tragically, work for the archive wound up in 1931, two years after Kahn lost his fortune in the Wall Street Crash. A museum in his memory is maintained at a garden he financed in Boulogne in Paris. Mespoulet moved to North America, where she taught at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, at Barnard College and latterly at Columbia University, both in New York City. Her most important research was dedicated to French writers Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and she was passionate about art. She published two works on the relationship between text and illustration: Creators of Wonderlands and Images et Romans: Parenté des Estampes et du Roman Réaliste de 1815 à 1865.

Mespoulet retained her nationality, returning to France every summer, and for the last time in 1964, six months before her death at the age of 85.

Madeleine Mignon-Alba taught in Reims for a number of years, before moving to Grenoble, where she met her husband, Andre Alba, a history teacher. The couple settled in Versailles, and were "dedicated to passing on to their pupils respect for humanist values and the necessity for tolerance". They travelled extensively, circumnavigating the globe with Kahn's support in 1930 - Alba had been selected for the last of the banker's many fellowships.

In Search of Ireland in 1913: Colour Photographs from the Archives of the Planet, an exhibition from the Musée Albert-Kahn, France, will open in Galway City Museum on Wednesday, running until Sept 30