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Russia in color, a century ago

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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 was a Russian chemist and photographer, one of the first to use color photography. He became well-known for taking a color photograph of Leo Tolstoy. He is also supposed to have taken color photographs of Nicholas II’s children, but the negatives have been lost, and are thought to have been destroyed in the revolution… 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. 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.

By The Boston Globe
Photo by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii

An Armenian woman in national costume poses for Prokudin-Gorskii on a hillside near Artvin (in present day Turkey), circa 1910
Self-portrait on the Karolitskhali River, ca. 1910. Prokudin-Gorskii in suit and hat, seated on rock beside the Karolitskhali River, in the Caucasus Mountains near the seaport of Batumi on the eastern coast of the Black Sea
Young peasant girls near the town of Kirillov, Russia, along the Sheksna River. Sometime between 1909-1915
A chapel sits on the site where the city of Belozersk was founded in ancient times, photographed in 1909
A man and woman pose in Dagestan, ca. 1910
Factory in Kyn, Russia, belonging to Count S.A. Stroganov, 1912
Russian children sit on the side of a hill near a church and bell tower near White Lake, in Russia, 1909
Emir Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara, seated holding a sword in Bukhara, (present-day Uzbekistan), ca. 1910
A boy leans on a wooden gatepost in 1910. From the album “Views in the Ural Mountains, survey of industrial area, Russian Empire”
A metal truss bridge on stone piers, part of the Trans-Siberian Railway, crossing the Kama River near Perm, Ural Mountains Region, ca. 1910
Nomadic Kirghiz on the Golodnaia Steppe in present-day Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, ca. 1910
View of Tiflis (Tblisi), Georgia from the grounds of Saint David Church, ca. 1910

Isfandiyar Jurji Bahadur, Khan of the Russian protectorate of Khorezm (Khiva, now a part of modern Uzbekistan), full-length portrait, seated outdoors, ca. 1910
A Georgian woman poses for a photograph, ca. 1910
A group of women in Dagestan, ca. 1910
A general view of Sukhumi, Abkhazia and its bay, seen sometime around 1910 from Cherniavskii Mountain
A boy sits in the court of Tillia-Kari mosque in Samarkand, present-day Uzbekistan, ca. 1910
General view of Artvin (now in Turkey) from the small town of Svet, ca. 1910
Pinkhus Karlinskii, eighty-four years old with sixty-six years of service. Supervisor of Chernigov floodgate, part of the Mariinskii Canal system. Photo taken in 1909
General view of the Nikolaevskii Cathedral from southwest in Mozhaisk in 1911
A switch operator poses on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, near the town of Ust Katav on the Yuryuzan River in 1910
Laying concrete for the dam’s sluice, 1912. Workers and supervisors pose for a photograph amid preparations for pouring cement for sluice dam foundation across the Oka River near Beloomut
Sart woman in purdah in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, ca. 1910. Until the Russian revolution of 1917, “Sart” was the name for Uzbeks living in Kazakhstan
General view of the wharf at Mezhevaya Utka, 1912
Peasants harvesting hay in 1909. From the album “Views along the Mariinskii Canal and river system, Russian Empire”
Prokudin-Gorskii rides along on a handcar outside Petrozavodsk on the Murmansk railway along Lake Onega near Petrozavodsk in 1910
A water-carrier in Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan), ca. 1910
A dog rests on the shore of Lake Lindozero in 1910. From the album “Views along the Murmansk Railway, Russian Empire”
A group of Jewish children with a teacher in Samarkand, (in modern Uzbekistan), ca. 1910

 

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