Psychedelic early color photos show a very sober Russian Empire
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In photography, like empire building, innovation is everything. Tsar Nicholas II learned this the hard way, but not before commissioning a groundbreaking photographic survey of his kingdom on the eve of revolution.
The pioneer color photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii was tasked with the job.
Between 1909 and 1915 Prokudin-Gorskii crisscrossed the empire in a specially modified darkroom railcar provided by the Tsar. He shot over 3,000 images documenting its diverse regions and people from the Caucuses to the Ural Mountains and Siberia. The Prokudin-Gorskii collection, now housed by the Library of Congress, is a glimpse into the final days of an empire, its constellation of cultures and verdant landscapes appearing disparate and isolated. The calm before the storm.
Using a camera of his own design, Prokudin-Gorskii’s ingenious method for crafting color photographs involved exposing a tall, rectangular glass plate negative three times in quick succession — each through a separate filter of red, blue, or green. The resulting monotone photo-in-triplicate would then be printed as a positive and projected through a three-lens lantern. Superimposed using the same colored filters, the layered projection effectively presented a full color image onscreen for an audience.
The digital composites shown here—a pixelated approximation of his vision—mimic the same principles of layered color channels Prokudin-Gorskii had in mind with his “optical color projections.”
Vast and massively diverse, the Russian Empire at its peak stretched across three continents, from Europe to Alaska. It held for nearly 200 years until February 1917 when it was overthrown in popular unrest—a result, in part, of the Tsar’s failure to modernize. People were no longer content with autocratic labor exploitation and food shortages. The 20th century had exposed them to something bigger.
Photographs courtesy the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Prokudin-Gorskii Collection.
