Photographs of Old Russia
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Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944) descended from a long line of Russian nobility famed for their esteemed military history. Prokudin-Gorsky, however, decided not to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors, choosing instead to make his name with a different kind of shooting.
At a young age, Sergey moved with his family from the hinterlands into Saint Petersburg, where he was fortunate enough to study chemistry under the tutelage of Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table. Around the same time, he also studied music and painting at the prestigious Imperial Academy of Arts. Developing an understanding in both the arts and sciences would prove to be vital for his career, as his eye for a picture and his understanding of chemicals meant he was uniquely suited to become a pioneer in the newest and most exciting artistic field of his day: photography.
Prokudin-Gorsky established a studio and laboratory in 1901, before heading to study three-colour photography under Adolf Miethe, then the most advanced practitioner in Germany, for six weeks. This technique had first been proposed by James Clerk Maxwell — discoverer of electromagnetic radiation, among other things — in 1855, but produced poor results until the photographic materials had sufficiently improved. Prokudin-Gorsky would take the technique to new heights.
The idea was to mimic the way a human eye senses colour: three black-and-white photographs would be taken through three different colour filters (red, green, and blue) which could then be projected on top of one another to form a colour image.
Sometime in 1905, Prokudin-Gorsky decided to take his pioneering process on the road, using it to document the extent of the Russian Empire. The project received royal approval with Tsar Nicholas II gifting a specially equipped train carriage outfitted as a darkroom, and permits that would allow the photographer to access to even restricted areas of the empire.
The timing of the subsequent work was entirely fortuitous, but the result means we have a rare record of a now lost world: Tsarist Russia on the eve of WWI and the subsequent Bolshevik Revolution. Over the course of ten years, Prokudin-Gorsky travelled all over Russia, amassing 10,000 photographs of his native land.
Later, under the new regime, Sergey was forced to take a professorship, putting an end to his travels. After a few years of this, he eventually managed to get permission to leave the USSR, leaving with his family in 1922 for France. Living in the capital, he continued to practice photography until he died in 1944, a month after the liberation of Paris.
Unfortunately, as Sergey left Russia, the authorities confiscated about half of his photos, meaning only a few thousand left the country with him. They remained in a Parisian basement gathering dust until 1948, when the United States Library of Congress purchased them from Prokudin-Gorsky’s sons for $5000. The institution has since produced automated colour composites of each of the 2,607 surviving negatives, digitised them, and entered them into the public domain.
Thanks to the painstaking work of the researchers, I’m now able to share with you with vivid images of a Russia long gone. Enjoy the photographs of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.
(All images courtesy of the Library of Congress)
These wonderful photographs have the effect of releasing their subjects from their prison of antiquity, at least for me. The black and white scrim, behind which we're used to seeing them, had cut them off from us. Now suddenly, they are not brought to life, exactly, but seamlessly joined to history's procession. Peter Jackson's colorized film of WWI, "They shall Not Grow Old," had the same effect. A war that belonged to a distant past was suddenly joined to the war that followed it — by only twenty years — a war that had seemed to belong to our own recent history. When we're shocked by these color images, we're not learning anything we didn't already "know." But now, we are seeing what came before with our mind's eye, which is a different and very deep kind of knowing.
I look at them and want to warn them of the new century coming.