Color pictures from Czarist Russia

by | Feb 4, 2010 | PHOTOGRAPHY

I stumbled upon these images a few months back, but didn’t really look into the gallery. Now that I’m seeing them again, it is a fascinating documentation of the last years of Czarist Russia. The image above is probably my favorite, showing classic Russian architecture alongside the beginnings of the industrial revolution, and the images I have selected to show here involve physical representations of such lines- the old and the new, the rich and the poor.

From Alex Gridenko:
Born in St. Petersburg and educated as a chemist, Prokudin-Gorskii devoted his career to the advancement of photography. In the early 1900s, he developed an ingenious technique of taking colour photographs. The same object was captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in colour in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters.



I stumbled upon these images a few months back, but didn’t really look into the gallery. Now that I’m seeing them again, it is a fascinating documentation of the last years of Czarist Russia. The image above is probably my favorite, showing classic Russian architecture alongside the beginnings of the industrial revolution, and the images I have selected to show here involve physical representations of such lines- the old and the new, the rich and the poor.

From Alex Gridenko:
Born in St. Petersburg and educated as a chemist, Prokudin-Gorskii devoted his career to the advancement of photography. In the early 1900s, he developed an ingenious technique of taking colour photographs. The same object was captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in colour in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters.







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