Posted on Thursday 14 November 2002
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a chemist turned photographer
ahead of his time who undertook an ambitious photographic survey of the
Russian Empire for Tsar Nicholas II.
Between 1909 and 1915,
he completed tours of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped
train carriage which had been provided by the Ministry of
Transportation.
What made this project remarkable was his use of an innovative technique for taking photographs in full and extremely vivid colour.
He
was able to capture colour by using a camera that exposed one oblong
glass plate three times in rapid succession through three different
colour filters: blue, green, and red. To view his images, he printed
positive glass slides of his negatives and projected them through a
triple lens magic lantern. The images were projected through
the three lenses and, with the use of colour filters, superimposed in
full colour on to a screen.
In 1918, Prokudin-Gorskii left
Russia and the glass plates of his unique images of Russia on the eve
of revolution were purchased from his heirs in 1948 by the U.S. Library
of Congress. Many, but not all1, of the plates have been
scanned and reconstituted through a process called digichromatography
into vivid full colour images. An online exhibition of these images can
be found on the Library of Congress web site as well as access to their collection of approximately 2,615 images, 110 of which have been made into full colour renderings.
Side
note: The images have a striking quality about them but the colour
renderings do contain some strange artifacts which come from the
process that Prokudin-Gorskii used to take them. Because each of his
three exposures probably took somewhere between 3 and 30 seconds, small
changes in the scene can show up looking a bit like rainbows or even
oil slicks. This is particularly noticeable in images of water or where
shadows are moving about such as under trees being blown by the breeze.
David Dyer-Bennet
demonstrates on his web site the feasibility of Prokudin-Gorskii's
method by using a garden variety digital camera and a copy of Photoshop
and examines these artifacts.
A.
P. Kalganov poses with his son and granddaughter for a portrait in the
industrial town of Zlatoust in the Ural Mountain region of Russia. The
son and granddaughter are employed at the Zlatoust Arms Plant--a major
supplier of armaments to the Russian military since the early 1800s.
Kalganov displays traditional Russian dress and beard styles, while the
two younger generations have more Westernized, modern dress and hair
styles.
Photographed in 1910 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.
Borzhomi
is a small town in the Caucasus Mountains in the interior of what is
now the Republic of Georgia. Noted for its mineral waters, it was a
fashionable spa at the end of the nineteenth century. Shown here are
elegantly dressed visitors posing for a photograph by the Ekaterinin,
("Catherine's") Spring.
Photographed in c 1907-1915 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.
Samarkand: a group of Jewish boys, in traditional dress, studying with their teacher.
Photographed in 1911 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.
A bureaucrat in Bukhara.
Photographed in 1911 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.
The
Emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan (1880-1944), poses solemnly for his
portrait, taken shortly after his accession. As ruler of an autonomous
city-state in Islamic Central Asia, the Emir presided over the internal
affairs of his emirate as absolute monarch, although since the
mid-1800s Bukhara had been a vassal state of the Russian Empire. With
the establishment of Soviet power in Bukhara in 1920, the Emir fled to
Afghanistan where he died in 1944.
Photographed in 1911 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii using his revolutionary colour technology.
1 You can find most of the remaining images of the collection (1,902 of them) as low quality colour images on Frank Dellaert's web site.
