Russia in Color, a Century Ago
An Armenian woman in national costume poses for Prokudin-Gorskii on a hillside near Artvin (in present day Turkey), look circa 1910.
This series of exquisitely beautiful images from southern and central Russia is already all over the web via the Boston Globe, no rx but Coilhouse has to post a heads up in case anybody missed them. Absolutely stunning. Boston.com editor-in-chief, buy viagra Alan Taylor, says:
“With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images.”
A man and woman pose in Dagestan, ca. 1910.
“The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948.”
The full gallery is viewable here, high res. Previously on Coilhouse:
- The Tarnished Beauties of Blackwell, Oklahoma
- Lost Marvels of Revolution Era Russian Theater
- Civil War Veteran and His Wife
- Post-Mortem Ebay Finds
- Yuri Gagarin, Space Cadet Under the Sea
Isfandiyar Jurji Bahadur, Khan of the Russian protectorate of Khorezm (Khiva, now a part of modern Uzbekistan), full-length portrait, seated outdoors, ca. 1910.
August 25th, 2010 at 11:25 pm
Yes! Aren’t they just exquisite? My sweetie and I were talking
about how strangely shocking it is to see color photographs from
that era. It makes it all seem so much closer, and – although we
know better, it’s easy to think of the world as being all black + white
back then. The Armenian woman in the woods up top is my favorite too.
August 27th, 2010 at 7:23 am
You can find the entire collection at the library of congress, although the digital images from the global seem to be of much higher quality
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/
August 29th, 2010 at 6:38 am
‘A man and woman pose in Dagestan, ca. 1910’ is an amazing picture; seems unreal those photos were taken so long ago. Makes me wonder why color photos weren’t a big thing back then.
January 9th, 2011 at 3:43 pm
A reminder of my Bohemian grandparents in l910, lunch time in the fields.