I’ve actually linked to these before, but a post over at i heart photograph reminded me about them and I was browsing through them again. Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a Russian photographer taking colour pictures in the years before the Great War. He took three black and white negatives of each subject using different coloured filters, then reassembled them using a projector and coloured light.
The Library of Congress have used a digital version of this process to recreate the images and have put them online. The one above is a harvest scene from 1909, but also check out i.e. Woman in Samarkand, dog, Siberian scenery, Georgian woman in national costume. [as Jean points out, those links don’t work: you’ll just have to browse the collection]
I find the particular aesthetic of the lurid coloured borders as appealing as the subjects, though those clearly have historical and ethnographic interest.
2 replies on “Prokudin-Gorskii photographs”
I love these photos – very atmospheric and compelling. Thanks for the link (by the way, your links to the individual photos aren’t working)
Ah, I should have checked them. That’s the trouble with these dynamically-generated URLs.
fwiw, I found that the best way of finding only the colour photos using the search tool was to include the search term ‘color composite’: i.e. ‘color composite dog’.