Egan
01-06-12, 09:48 AM
I first saw these a few months ago whilst looking for some old photgraphs of something or other, and I was completely blown away by them.
The photographs of Russian chemist and photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, show Russia on the eve of World War I and the coming of the revolution. From 1909-1912 and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii travelled across the Russian Empire, documenting life, landscapes and the work of Russain people. His images were to be a photographic survey of the time. He travelled in a special train car transformed into a dark room to process his special process of creating color images, a technology that was in its infancy in the early 1900***8242;s. Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia in 1918, after the Russian Revolution had destroyed the Empire he spent years documenting. To learn more about the Prokudin-Gorskii, the process he used to create the color photographs, and see his collection, you can visit the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/), who purchased his glass negatives in 1948 after his death in 1944
Check them out:
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2009/10/21/color-photography-from-russian-in-the-early-1900s/544/
And then have a look at the stuff the Library of Congress has put online. They are amazing, absoulutely amazing. They really do look like they could have been taken yesterday and have a sharpness to them that is quite phenomenol. I visited the new photography gallery at the Victoria and Albert in London a few weeks ago, but, brilliant as it was, it had nothing like these. I beleive there was a book released at some point. I'll have to see if I can find it.
The photographs of Russian chemist and photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, show Russia on the eve of World War I and the coming of the revolution. From 1909-1912 and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii travelled across the Russian Empire, documenting life, landscapes and the work of Russain people. His images were to be a photographic survey of the time. He travelled in a special train car transformed into a dark room to process his special process of creating color images, a technology that was in its infancy in the early 1900***8242;s. Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia in 1918, after the Russian Revolution had destroyed the Empire he spent years documenting. To learn more about the Prokudin-Gorskii, the process he used to create the color photographs, and see his collection, you can visit the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/), who purchased his glass negatives in 1948 after his death in 1944
Check them out:
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2009/10/21/color-photography-from-russian-in-the-early-1900s/544/
And then have a look at the stuff the Library of Congress has put online. They are amazing, absoulutely amazing. They really do look like they could have been taken yesterday and have a sharpness to them that is quite phenomenol. I visited the new photography gallery at the Victoria and Albert in London a few weeks ago, but, brilliant as it was, it had nothing like these. I beleive there was a book released at some point. I'll have to see if I can find it.