2015 marks the centennial of a key moment in the life of another giant in the field of Colour Photography: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. In 1909 Gorskii was commissioned by Tsar Nicolas II to document the sprawling Russian Empire, which then covered approximately twenty percent of the world’s land mass. Between 1909 and 1915 Gorskii travelled through western Russia down the Volga River, over the Ural Mountains and into Siberia, before heading south into Turkestan and the Caucuses documenting the vast cultural landscape of late Imperial Russia. Each of the many thousands of images were taken in colour using, what was then, cutting edge technology: photographic glass plates coated with light sensitive emulsion were placed within a handheld camera that exposed one long glass plate three times, each with a different colour filter in quick succession. These astonishing images represent one of the world’s first ever large-scale colour photographic projects. In 2012 the publication of a series of excerpts from Gorskii’s vast archive[1] were revealed to the world, and quickly went on to attract global attention in the mainstream media[2]. What has gone unrecognized, however, is that these images were based precisely on the pioneering methods of James Clerk Maxwell.
Excerpts from this vast archive of imagery have recently been published in Nostalgia. The Russian Empire of Czar Nicholas II, Captured in Color Photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. gestalten, Berlin, 2012.
[2]
20 August 2010: Russia in color, a century ago
28 August 2010: Portraits of a Lost Russia
22 March 2012: In pictures: Russian Empire in colour photos
1 April 2014: Vintage photographs that are made for sharing online – in pictures
11 July 2014: The evolution of colour photography in modern Russia
