Gorgeous, juicy and absolutely technically modern looking photographs of pre-revolutionary Russia from the Library of the American Congress. This is a fresh and goosebumps real look at Russia at the beginning of the century. How it all really looked. People and architecture, objects and views. It's like a time machine …
The history of these photos
A certain man named Prokudin-Gorsky in 1909-10 came up with the following thing: to photograph objects 3 times through 3 filters - red, green and blue. It turned out 3 black and white photographs. The projection of the three plates had to be simultaneous. He used a small folding camera like the one designed by Adolf Meath. Three exposures of the same object, taken at approximately one second intervals, were required on the same glass plate 84–88 mm wide and 232 mm long. The plate changed position every time, and the image was captured through three different color filters. The subjects to be filmed had to be stationary, which was a big limitation. Here is how it was done, and here.
The projector has also undergone changes. Prokudin-Gorsky improved the F. E. Willow created the apparatus according to his own drawings: three diamond-shaped prisms were fastened together, creating one combined prism. Thus, it was possible to focus all three colors on the screen.
The only thing he could do with all this at the time was to insert them into 3 different projectors, with red, green, and blue, respectively, and point the projectors to one screen. The result was a color image. He began to actively work on the problems of color cinematography. Keeping in touch with many scientific societies at home and abroad, he traveled to Berlin, London, Rome with reports.
He did not forget about the Russian public either. Back in 1900, he received the Grand Prix at the international exhibition in Paris. In 1913, he performed a slide show at the largest cinema in Paris. The success was so huge that large foreign companies bombarded him with job offers. But he could not leave Russia: too much was connected with it. Prokudin-Gorsky in 1909, through the intermediary of the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, who was the Honorary Chairman of the St. Petersburg Photographic Society, receives an audience with Tsar Nicholas II. The Tsar invites Prokudin-Gorsky to perform with a screening of transparencies in front of the Imperial Court in Tsarskoe Selo. When showing, Sergei Mikhailovich had to comment on the pictures, and he did it just dramatically.
Towards the end of the demonstration, a delighted whisper was heard in the hall. At the end, the king shook his hand, the empress and the royal children congratulated him on his success. Then the tsar instructs him to photograph all sorts of aspects of life in all areas that then made up the Russian Empire.
Promotional video:
Although this project seemed very daring, the ultimate goal of Prokudin-Gorsky was to familiarize Russian schoolchildren with the vast and varied history, culture and modernization of the Empire through his “optical color projections (most likely also to familiarize the heir to the throne with all this). For this, the photographer was issued two special permits, the first said that His Imperial Majesty the Highest allows him to stay in any place, regardless of secrecy, and photograph even strategically important objects.
The second was a ministerial decree, which declared that the Emperor considered the mission entrusted to Prokudin-Gorsky to be so important that all officials should assist him "anywhere and at any time." For the trip, the photographer was given an assistant on organizational issues and a Pullman carriage, which was specially adapted: a perfectly equipped laboratory was deployed there, including a dark room, so that the development of photographic plates could be carried out even on the road. The carriage accommodated the photographer himself and his assistants, including his 22-year-old son Dmitry. There was hot and cold water, a glacier …
A special vessel and a small sloop with a motor were provided to work on the Mariinsky canal system. Between 1909 and 1912, and then in 1915, Prokudin-Gorsky surveyed eleven regions of the Russian Empire. The emperor insistently demanded that Prokudin-Gorsky be provided with everything he needed, and even expressed a desire to follow him on one of his future trips. In addition to photography, Prokudin-Gosrsky gave many lectures illustrating his work
The first official viewing by the tsar of photographs of the waterway of the Mariinsky Canal and the industrial Urals took place in March 1910; the last exhibition of photographs was opened in March 1918 in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace.
The old woman. General view with the Volga.
Prokudin-Gorsky managed to leave for the revolution, and he managed to take with him 20 boxes of photographic plates, only about a thousand photographs - with the exception of photographs of strategically important objects and photographs of the royal family confiscated from him (he managed to take with him only one photo of the young tsarevich). Color photographs of the royal family may have remained somewhere in our archives. Equipment and projector could not be collected. In emigration, Prokudin-Gorsky's goal - to reveal the benefits of color photography for education and science - remained unchanged. In England, he patented the development of an optical system for a movie camera. To test it, he moved to Nice in 1922, where, together with the Lumière brothers, he opened a photographic laboratory.
In 1948, after his death, his son in Paris sold these records to the American Library of Congress. It turned out to be very difficult to turn them into regular color images due to the fact that most of them had non-trivial spatial discrepancy between the three color versions. So they lay still until recently. And suddenly it occurred to some library official: they also need to be scanned, loaded into Adobe Photoshop and there to combine the outlines of the three color options. So they did, and were amazed: the world, long gone, and known only from bad black-and-white pictures, suddenly rebelled in all its colors …
Permian.
If you want to try to find familiar places or hometown in this archive, then it is most convenient to use a special search: enter any word in the window (for example, Volga), and you get the desired result. For each photo there is an uncompressed tif version (up to 50 mb). The smallest details can be seen on it. In order to view an enlarged (approximately 4 times) version of this photo, it is enough to replace the letter “r” with “v” before the last point of the copied address. The resolution of these images is such that the image quality will not deteriorate. In order to get the largest version in the.tif format, substitute “u.tif” instead of “r.jpg” in the address. But it will take a very long time to load:) I don’t know about you, but my photos cause a feeling not only of harmony and some special solidity of THAT Russian life,but also the incredible power and vitality of Russia at that time … In all cities and villages, something is being repaired, erected, under construction, electric poles have already been built everywhere, wires have been laid …
In general, the idea was brilliant. It’s interesting: they all fully understood WHAT they were doing for us.
Even then, three years ago, looking at these photos, I was amazed at the integrity, serenity and strength that is spilled there. It was felt that the entire Russian life of that time was permeated with the spirit of some kind of unity. And so, I wanted to somehow express this spirit in words. And only now, having returned to these photos, I understood what this calmness is talking about; that it means "master of the house."
Recovery of photographs of S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky at the Yaroslavl State University. P. G. Demidova (very high quality restoration).
You can view all color photographs of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century (1902 photographs by Prokudin-Gorsky) on the website prokudin-gorsky.ru (a complete database of color images of S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky), in Russian.
The restored photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky are on the website museum.ru
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944) made a significant contribution to the development of photography. A graduate of the Technological Institute in St. Petersburg, Sergei Mikhailovich continued his studies as a chemist in Berlin and Paris. Collaborated with renowned chemists and inventors: Edme Jules Maumene (1818-1898) and Adolf Miethe (1862-1927), with whom he worked on the development of promising methods of color photography.
On December 13, 1902, Prokudin-Gorsky first announced the creation of color transparencies using the method of tricolor photography, and in 1905 he patented his sensitizer, which was superior in quality to similar developments of foreign chemists, including the Mite sensitizer.
Since that time, Prokudin-Gorsky has been making color photographs of L. N. Tolstoy, F. I. Chaliapin, the royal family and many other people. His photographs of ancient vases, Hermitage exhibits, were later used to restore their lost color.
Color photograph of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana, 1908.
In 1909, Prokudin-Gorsky received an audience with Tsar Nicholas II, expressed to him his idea to capture in color photographs contemporary Russia - its culture, history, all sorts of aspects of life in all the regions that then made up the Russian Empire.
The Tsar approved of the photographer's plans and allocated him a specially equipped railway carriage. Officials were ordered to help Prokudin-Gorsky in his travels and not even interfere with photographing strategic objects, including bridges and factories.
Steam locomotive "Compound" with a superheater "Schmidt", 1909.
In 1909-1915 Prokudin-Gorsky traveled a significant part of Russia, photographing ancient temples and monasteries, views of cities, fields and forests, various everyday scenes of the Russian hinterland. In the same years, in Samarkand, Prokudin-Gorsky is testing a cinema apparatus he invented for color filming. However, the quality of the filmed film was unsatisfactory.
After the October Revolution, Prokudin-Gorsky left Russia, taking with him almost all the photographic plates (RGB plates) he had made, with the exception of the photographs of the royal family and strategic objects seized from him.
Once in exile, the photographer spent some time in Norway and England. After moving to Nice in 1922, Prokudin-Gorsky worked with the Lumière brothers. In the early 30s, the photographer was engaged in educational activities in France and was even going to take a new series of photographs of artistic monuments of France and its colonies. This idea was realized by the son of Prokudin-Gorsky - Mikhail.
Died Prokudin-Gorsky in Paris on September 27, 1944, a few weeks after the liberation of the city by the Allied troops. He was buried in the Russian cemetery in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois.
The fate of the collection of color photographs by Prokudin-Gorsky
The collection of color photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was purchased from his heirs in 1948 by the Library of Congress and was kept there for a long time in the archives. Only the development of computer technology made it possible to process these images and show the unique views of the Russian Empire in full color.
In 2001, the Library of Congress opened the exhibition "The Empire That Russia Was". For her, the glass plates were scanned, and the original color photographs were recreated with the help of a computer, retouched and color corrected.
In total, Prokudin-Gorsky's collection - "Collection of Russian attractions in natural colors" - has 1902 color and about 1000 black and white photographs. Their restoration and processing continues to this day.
Download All 1902 color photos: rutracker.org
A film about the photographer S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky. "The color of time": rutracker.org