2004.07.27
The empire that was…
“The Emir of Bukhara” (1911), by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii
Prokudin-Gorskii, with the support of Tsar Nicholas II, spent several years in the early part of the twentieth century shooting the countryside and peoples of Russia. An inventor and scientist, he developed a special camera that could take (in rapid succession, and on a single plate) images of the same scene shot through red, green and blue filters. Intended for projection, the images would combine to form a color image when projected through the same set of colored filters (much like the three-strip technicolor process in motion pictures). The result was a series of images of immense beauty and historical importance, a record of a world vanished into the mists of revolution and change.
About 70 of his photos, combined digitally from scans of original glass plate negatives, are on display as part of “The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated,” a web exhibit hosted by the Library of Congress.