The Empire That Was Russia
Jan. 31st, 2004 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinYou may well have seen this already; it's been up for several years at the Library of Congress Web site, and I was reminded of it by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
graydon's stopword exercise.
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokhudin-Gorskii was the official photographer to the Tsar in the final years of the old Russian Empire. Between 1909 and 1915 he traveled around the empire taking gorgeously detailed photographs using a glass-plate color-separation process of his own invention. He didn't have any means of making color prints, but he did make slides from which he could produce color images with a special projector. Today, the color images can be recovered digitally.
Our mental images of past ages are to some degree colored by the state of visual recording that was generally available at the time. You don't expect to see a color photo taken in the borderlands of the Russian Empire in 1911 that looks as good as something taken this year. But these pictures do, and the effect is almost jarring; the only telltale signs of Prokhudin-Gorskii's process are the rainbow fringes on moving clouds and water.
graydon's stopword exercise.Sergei Mikhailovich Prokhudin-Gorskii was the official photographer to the Tsar in the final years of the old Russian Empire. Between 1909 and 1915 he traveled around the empire taking gorgeously detailed photographs using a glass-plate color-separation process of his own invention. He didn't have any means of making color prints, but he did make slides from which he could produce color images with a special projector. Today, the color images can be recovered digitally.
Our mental images of past ages are to some degree colored by the state of visual recording that was generally available at the time. You don't expect to see a color photo taken in the borderlands of the Russian Empire in 1911 that looks as good as something taken this year. But these pictures do, and the effect is almost jarring; the only telltale signs of Prokhudin-Gorskii's process are the rainbow fringes on moving clouds and water.
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-31 06:47 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-01-31 10:59 pm (UTC)Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Wikipedia Cha Cha Cha, In Living Color!
Date: 2004-01-31 07:45 pm (UTC)The colorful Russian's self portrait, 1915
On Wikipedia there was recently discussion on sharpening Prokudin-Gorskii 3 plate images with Photoshop.
Wikipedia has even used a few of his pics to illustrate articles, such as Peony. Yay for the public domain, even if we're eternally stuck in 1922.
As a collector of old National Geographics (cheap yard/junk sale finds only, so my collection is very sparce and spotty pre 1920) I'm familiar with the fact that color photography did not come on the scene in the 1950s nor at the 1939 World's Fair, it was around but expensive and difficult long before. I scanned a 1914 Nat'nl Geo pic to illustrate Butter.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-02 09:10 pm (UTC)http://www.humanedge.biz/testwow/testwow43.htm
Thanks.