Posted on Thursday 29 January 2004

Back in November 2002 I blogged about the photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.

Thirty years before the advent of three layer colour film, Prokudin-Gorskii developed a technique for taking colour photographs. His approach was to take three images in succession each one through a different colour filter (red, green and blue) and by using a special "magic lantern" projector he was then able to recombine the three plates onto a projection screen.

The results were truly remarkable and must have greatly impressed his contemporary viewers (accustomed as they would have been to monochrome photography) in faithfully capturing colours from the natural world.

They remain pretty damned remarkable to this day.

In Italy

The glass plates of his images were purchased from his heirs in 1948 by the U.S. Library of Congress and can be viewed online, 110 of them have been made into full colour renderings.

Recently I became aware (via mefi) of a site which has been making an effort to digitally recombine the remaining plates. The results while not quite as good as the ones commissioned by the Library are still quite wonderful.

Factory at Borzhom in Georgia. Note the rainbow effect in the smoke. This is an artifact of Prokudin-Gorskii's photographic technique which had difficulty capturing fast moving elements such as smoke or water. This was because it required a different shot for each colour component and these would have been taken seconds or even minutes apart. c 1907-1915

Mugan. A Georgian woman in national costume c 1907-1915

Man seated with water pipe, next to an ornate wall. Samarkand 1911.

Kush-Beggi (Minister of the Interior). Bukhara 1911