History in Colour - Sergey-Prokudin Gorsky 1909-1915.pdf - Rosja i kraje CCCP - morefaya2006

History in Colour

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky 1909-1915

Self portrait by Sergey Prokudin Gorsky (1915).

Despite the idylic riverside scene, at this time Russia was in continuing

political turmoil.

Contents Introduction:

Sergey Prkudin-Gorsky: Photographer of a Lost World

Contents

Introduction:

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: Photogra-

pher of a Lost World

Section Two: Samarkand

1: Fabric Seller

2: Bread Vendor

3: Tajik Man

4: Water Carrier

5: A View of Samarkand

6: On the Registan

7: Shashlik Stand

8: Jewish Boys with their Teacher

9: Watermelon Seller

10: The Shir Dar Madrassa

12: The Shakh-i Zindeh Mosque

Section Three: Stepp e & Beyond

1: Watching a Solar Eclipse

2: Caravan of the Golodnaia

Steppe

3: Russian Settlers

4: Bayga Horse Race

5: A Caravan Outside Samarkand

6:TurkmenCamel Driver-

7: Nomads Rest

8: Girl by a Yurt

9: Family by a Yurt

Section One: Bukhara

1: The Palace of Alim Khan

2: Sentry on Duty

3: Minister Kush-Baggi

4: Two Prisoners

5: The Zindan

6: A Government Official

7: A Sart Woman

Section One: Caucuses

Section Two: West Russia

Section Three: The Urals

Section Four: Siberia

Section Five: Bukhara

Section Six: Samarkand

Section Seven: Steppe and Beyond

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

Photographer of a lost world

CENTURY AGO WHEN photography was still some-

thing of an experimental proposition, Sergey Proku-

din-Gorsky embarked on an extraordinary mission

to document the diversity of life in the vastness

of Imperial Russia. Equipped with a clever spring-operated

camera of his own design and travelling in a private railroad

carriage provided by Tsar Nicolas II, he journeyed the length

and breadth of the empire, photographing villages and cities,

churches and mosques, princes and vagabonds – and most

startling of all, his vibrant pictures were all captured in col-

our. The often candid scenes are even more arresting to the

modern viewer when one considers that within a few years of

Prokudin-Gorsky’s irst shots, the Bolsheviks had seized pow-

er in the October Revolution, the Tsar and his family had been

murdered, and the lives of those who were caught on camera

would never be the same again.

The Prokudin-Gorsky method

At its inception in the 1830s photography was a black-and-

white afair; colour photography would languish in the dark-

room until the late 1860s when various rudimentary methods

were devised for recreating primitive colour images. Proku-

din-Gorsky’s technique, developed in the irst decade of the

twentieth century, relied on a camera that took three images

in quick succession through diferent coloured ilters. It was

then possible to reconstruct the original scene in colour by

projecting all three monochrome plates simultaneously

through the right quality of light. Although groundbreaking

for its day, the Prokudin-Gorsky method was not without its

drawbacks. As the three images were taken at slightly difer-

ent times (at best, over a period of six seconds but frequently

taking much longer) any restlessness on the part of the sub-

ject during the exposure time showed up in print as garish

multicoloured smudging. We can only imagine, therefore,

that our valiant and road-weary hero sufered frequent ex-

asperations at the hands of idgeting children and agitated

camels as he went about his delicate labours.

Ironically it is only recently, in the age of Photoshop and the

digitisation of photography, that Prokudin-Gorsky’s venerable

images have been widely seen at their full potential. Curi-

ous observers in the Tsar’s day generally had to be satisied

with slideshow projections, as a long and laborious printing

procedure prohibited the mass production of colour prints.

Prokudkin-Gorsky also found himself dedicating much of his

time away from the camera lense to touring the lecture circuit

in order to help fund his ongoing expeditions, thereby leav-

ing precious little time for the business of printing. However,

some of his pictures did reach the public in their true quality,

sometimes appearing in contemporary journals and books, or

at other times featuring on postcards - a hugely popular com-

munications phenomena at the time and in some ways the

Edwardian equivalent of a text message.

Self portrait by a stream, 1915

Before he was famous

Prokudin-Gorsky was born in St Petersburg in 1863 into a mi-

nor noble family with a long-standing military tradition. Hav-

ing a more cerebral bent than his forefathers, Prokudin-Gor-

sky passed on a military career and decided instead to enter

Shir Dar minaret, Samarkand (1911)

the Saint Petersburg Institute of Technology to study chemis-

try, also inding time to study painting and music at the Impe-

rial Academy of Arts. Chemistry and the Arts may not sound

immediately like a happy marriage of subjects but Prokudin-

Gorsky’s interest in both would meet perfectly in his passion

for photography.

In 1889, at the age of twenty-six he travelled to Germany

to study photochemistry at the Berlin Technical University.

There he met and studied under Adolf Miethe, a fellow pio-

neer of colour photography, who was conducting early ex-

periments with a three-color system.

Realising that Miethe’s methods of colour photography

needed further development, Prokudin Gorsky established

his own photographic studio upon his return to Russia in the

early 1890s allowing him to continue his research. As the years

passed he made a name for himself in Russian photography

circles, winning prizes for his colour exhibitions, publishing

a booklet on instant handheld cameras, and writing techni-

cal articles on the principals of colour reproduction. By 1907,

however, he was developing grander designs. A desire was

building in his heart to undertake a comprehensive visual

survey of the Russian Empire, documenting the rich diversity

of its people, places and geography, across all its disparate

regions. Surely the sheer might and enormity of the Russian

realm was deserving of such an ambitious endeavour? And

Prokudin-Gorsky, with his rapidly improving colour photog-

raphy skills, believed he was just the man to carry it out.

Capturing the empire on ilm

To have any chance of bringing his monumental plans to frui-

tion, Prokudin-Gorsky required an equally big break. Fortu-

nately, he didn’t have long to wait. The catalyst for his sudden

rise to prominence came in 1908, and in rather unexpected

fashion, when he chanced his luck with a letter to Russia’s

grand old man of letters, Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy:

Dear Lev Nikolaevich,

Not long ago I had the occasion to develop a colour photograph-

ic plate which someone had taken of you (I forget the person’s

name). The result was extremely bad, since, apparently, the pho-

tographer was not well acquainted with his task...

Goverment Official, Bukhara c.1910

As it turned out, the trashing of a competitor’s profession-

al skills paid dividends and the elderly author of gratuitously

long literature was willing to indulge Prokudin-Gorsky’s re-

quest for a photoshoot. The resultant (superior) colour por-

trait, produced after a short stay at Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana

country estate, became a huge hit across the nation. It was

reproduced in books, in journals, on postcards and would no

doubt have been put on T-shirts had the technology been

available at the time. Much more importantly, however, it

caught the eye of the only man who could make Prokudin-

Gorsky’s dream of an Imperial photographic survey a reality

- Tsar Nicolas II himself.

Prokudin-Gorsky was invited to give a presentation to

the Tsar and his family in 1909, and used the opportunity to

propose his grand ethnographic venture. So taken was the

Tsar by the colour photographs on show, that he agreed to

give Prokudin-Gorsky his backing, granting him royal fund-

ing as well as providing all necessary visa documentation for

his travels - no mean feat in a bureaucracy such as Russia’s.

With all obstacles thus surmounted, Prokudin-Gorsky set of

on what he regarded as his life’s work, taking over 10,000

photographs over the course of the next nine years, right up

until the days of the October Revolution.

Prokudin-Gorsky left Russia for good in 1918, dying in

German occupied Paris as an old man in 1944. Several hun-

dred of his colour photographs have survived the caprices

of history and continue to enthrall, startle and inspire. Now,

thanks to the wonders of digital imagery, they have been

preserved in their full inery as an exotic record of a bygone

age and a lost world.

Leo Tolstoy, 1909

History in Colour - Sergey-Prokudin Gorsky 1909-1915.pdf

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