UNIQUE AND INTERESTING

RUSSIA IN COLOUR, A CENTURY AGO (PART 1)

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. 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.

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, 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.


Molding of an artistic casting (Kasli Iron Works), 1910.


A woman is seated in a calm spot on the Sim River, part of the Volga watershed in 1910.


A chapel sits on the site where the city of Belozersk was founded in ancient times, photographed in 1909.


Tiflis (Tblisi), Georgia from the grounds of Saint David Church, 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 closer detail view of Isfandiyar, Khan of the Russian protectorate of Khorezm. This photo would have been taken near the start of his reign in 1910, when he was 39 years old. He ruled Khorezm until his death in 1918.

On the Sim River, a shepherd boy.


Alternators made in Budapest, Hungary, in the power generating hall of a hydroelectric station in Iolotan (Eloten), Turkmenistan, on the Murghab River, 1910.

A Georgian woman poses for a photograph.

A group of women in Dagestan.

General view of Artvin (now in Turkey) from the small town of Svet, 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.

Jewish children with a teacher in Samarkand, (in modern Uzbekistan), 1910.

A switch operator poses on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, near the town of Ust Katav on the Yuryuzan River in 1910.