“The photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world – the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia’s diverse population.”
- The Empire that was Russia, Library of Congress
These are truly remarkable, beautiful, pictures.
What wonderful pictures. The colours are amazing. It does help to capture the people of Russia of that era, outside of the big cities.
A great study of these people in photos.
I think it’s cool that you can see how they were created if you look carefully at subjects that have some movement in them (the river, a baby, a horse’s ears, etc).
Amazing! I had no idea that there was color photo’s at that time and with such quality. I really enjoyed being taken back in time!
These pictures are amazing! They look like they might have been taken yesterday and they show a truly diverse Russia that spanned two continents. It’s wonderful to take a look to a time back where hardly anyone remembers today.
realy great photo`s! I finde also the reflected costume study in it very interesting . … there was no colour photography at the time- the pictures was colored with the brush, or maby thea are recolored later.
They had color photography at this time. Looking at the picture with the running water it looks like they used the process (called subtractive color) of taking three pictures with a different colored filter (red green and blue) over the lens. When the three negatives were combined it formed a color photo. As you can see it was time consuming but took wonderful color photos.
Here is a link showing how it is done one and using one of the photos from this series.
Color Photography
Emir of Bukhara
Ces photos sont exceptionnelles! J’adore…
to Katarina Skupch. There was color photography in that time, these were not coloured with brush, but taking three different color lence photos un making them like one and result is – colour photography. Read about that great scientist from Russia, who did it – Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. I have collection of about 1200 pictures by him, but most of them black&white, but part is colour.
Btw, these pictures are stunning, for me it was like i walked there with time machine, i breath air from nearly 100 years ago, speaked with people there… just in my imagination.
It’s remarkable to see the vibrant colour of the clothing. In my minds eye, the people of that time wear mute, drab colours. It’s lovely to see how wrong I was.