What would you capture?
Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky / Ostrecheny, 1909
Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky / Monastery haying, Leushinsky Monastery, 1909
Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky / At the stubble-field, 1909
At the dawn of the 20th Century, the photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky convinced Tsar Nicholas II to commission a series of photographs capturing the nuances of the Russian Empire. The series would utilize a new technique in image making Prokudin-Gorsky had developed. The process involved layering multiple color filters of the same image to form a full color photograph.
These photos of common people in everyday scenes are breathtaking, not only for their vivid beauty and as documents of the past, but their ability to collapse the divide of time that separates us from our ancestors.
Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky / Three generations, A.P. Kalganov with his son and granddaughter
Since each photo would take one full minute to capture, the subjects would have to remain completely still for the layering process to work correctly. So when you see an image like this one, of people at work, committing themselves to a frozen pose, you have to imagine that they saw some value in passing these stories on to us, the great-grandchildren they would never meet.
Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky / Forming art castings. Kasli, 1910
Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky / Participants of the Railway Building, 1915
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