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Russia in colour a century ago
by JonathanTuesday August 24, 2010
A friend sent me a link to these incredible photographs taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii a whole century ago in central Russia during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II.
Apparently Prokudin-Gorskii pioneered a method which involved taking three black and white pictures in rapid succession using filters (red, green and blue) and then, at the developing stage, he blended them together to synthesise complete colour images. As there don’t seem to be any restrictions on their publication, here are a couple of my favourites. The first is of a switch operator on the Trans-Siberian railway near Ust Katav in 1910:
The second is of hay harvesters near the Mariinskii Canal, taken the previous year:
There’s something uncanny about these faces from history appearing in full colour, in that they appear at once both familiar and foreign (not just in the geographical sense): I suppose we are accustomed to viewing human history from the early 20th century onwards through the prism of old stills or footage in black and white – so much so that it’s almost as if the world actually existed without any colour until the 1960s – and this normally serves to create a neat gulf between past and present. It’s so unusual to get a glimpse of the distant past recorded in chromatic detail that you can scarcely believe these pictures were taken so long ago!