What Russia looked like before 1917 … in color

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21 apr 2016 11:48

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was born near Moscow in 1863. Educated as a chemist, Prokudin-Gorskii applied his knowledge and skills towards the advancement of photography. He was especially interested in the reproduction of color, which at the time was a tedious and difficult process.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii sits beside the Karolitskhali River. (1912)

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Though some of his images date back to 1905, the bulk of his work documenting the Russian empire of Tsar Nicholas II took place between 1909-1915. Prokudin-Gorskii’s color photos were recorded as “separation negatives” on black and white glass plates. The camera he used made three sequential exposures through blue, green and red filters. He then printed these negatives as positives, which he inserted into a magic lantern to project and superimpose the frames back through the same combination of filters. The result was a full color reproduction of the original scene.

Catholic Armenian women in customary dress. (between 1905 and 1915)

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The bulk of this project took place from 1909 to 1915, when Prokudin-Gorskii traveled about the land in a railroad car outfitted as a darkroom, provided to him by the tsar.

Pinkhus Karlinskii. 84, supervisor of the Chernigov floodgate, with 66 years of service. (1909)

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Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia in 1918 after the revolution. He eventually settled in Paris, where he died in 1944. The Library of Congress purchased the collection from his sons in 1948.

Three young women offer berries to visitors to their izba, a traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River, near the town of Kirillov. (1909)

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The Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii collection of the Library of Congress has 1,902 of these black and white glass triple-frame plates, as well as several thousand sepia toned and color prints.

Digital color composites for these images were made for the Library of Congress by Blaise Agüera y Arcas in 2004. Images are courtesy of the Library of Congress.