Video: Pre-revolutionary Russia in color photographs by Prokudin-Gorsky
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The piercingly clear photographs of S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky caught the last breath from the lips of the fading Russian Empire, frozen on the eve of war and revolutions; these pictures are a spacious patchwork quilt of nationalities, lands and events of a bygone era. Prokudin-Gorsky's photographic study of the sights of the vast fatherland was rediscovered only recently, after spending more than eighty years in oblivion.
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was educated as a chemist and dedicated his life to his love of photography. In the early 1900s, he discovered a brilliant color imaging technique - decades before the widespread use of color film.
The negative of such a picture was a black-and-white plate, above which three images were placed in a row, taken through blue, green and red filters; the picture was projected onto the screen.
Having received the approval of Tsar Nicholas II, the photographer from 1909 to 1915 explored eleven regions of the Russian Empire, traveling in a specially equipped railway carriage. Both the old monasteries and churches of Russia and the railways and factories that were gaining industrial power became the subjects for the landscape works of Prokudin-Gorsky. A whole string of outstanding photographs captured the motley Russian people: everyone, from a day laborer to a landowner, from a simple boatman to a magnificently dressed emir, from a Jew to a Don Cossack, became the subject of the photographer's interest.
In 1918, after the revolution, Prokudin-Gorsky left Russia and went to England, taking with him about two thousand plates of negatives from the planned, but never filmed until the end of ten thousand.
In 1948, the library of the US Congress acquired an extensive collection of photographs from the heirs of the already deceased photographer, in the archives of which it lay dead weight, since no data on how to view these photographs was preserved.
The treasures of the collection remained unclaimed until 2001, when the images were scanned and regained their brightness thanks to the innovative digital color restoration technique.
The exceptionally skillful work with color and the experienced look of Prokudin-Gorsky make his photographs especially rich in life and leave a feeling of frozen time, bringing back to life the beauty and power of a lost era.
You can read about the fate of the patron saint of Prokudin-Gorsky, the last Russian emperor Nicholas II, in the material “7 Russian monarchs who were killed”.
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