Russia, In Color, 100 Years Ago

This website link from Boston.com was recommended on a listserve that I subscribe to and I wanted to share it with my readers. I can’t believe how haunted I am by these photos.

They were taken between 1909 and 1912 by a photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who was commissioned by Czar Nicholas II to do a photographic survey of the Russian Empire. What is really fascinating to me is that there was no color film back in that time. So what he did is he captured three black and white images and then during development, used different colored filters and combined the different colors into layers and then printed these photos. He took hundreds of photos which are now owned by the Library of Congress who purchased the glass plates in 1948.

Photographs such as these are typically sepia at this point and many are damaged from poor storage. These photographs are so vivid and beautiful and provide an amazing link to the past that to me, is easier to view and relate to than those old faded sepias. They share a life and a culture that no longer exists.