Produkin-Gorskii: The Tsar's Russia - in colour

[Egan]

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, who purchased his glass negatives in 1948 after his death in 1944

Check them out:

http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured...rly-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.