Prokudin Gorskii

The photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world - the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution.
Born in St. Petersburg and educated as a chemist, Prokudin-Gorskii devoted his career to the advancement of photography. In the early 1900s, he developed an ingenious technique of taking colour photographs. The same object was captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in colour in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters.
Around 1907 Prokudin-Gorskii envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advancements that had been made in colour photography to systematically document the Russian Empire. Through such an ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical colour projections" of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire. The plan won the support of Tsar Nicholas II. Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population.

In 1918, having lost all his money and property during the revolution, Prokudin-Gorskii went into exile, taking with him only his collection of nearly 2,000 glass-plate negatives and his photograph albums. The collection was purchased by the Library of Congress (LOC) in 1948 from his heirs.

In 2001, the number of glass plates have been scanned and, through an innovative process known as digichromatography, brilliant colour images have been produced. Virtual exhibition The Empire that Was Russia attracted millions of people throughout the world.

Please note that these images are NOT colorized black and white photographs. They were actually taken in colour about hundred years ago!

Because of many years of negligent storing, most of the negatives are in very poor condition, and it takes me hours of scrupulous work to restore their original brilliance. It is just the beginning of the work and I am going to continue. Hundreds of unique colour images of the past are still waiting to be returned back to life.

An Explanation of the Color Rendering Process, “Digichromatography”

There is no known replica or illustration of the camera that Prokudin-Gorskii used. It was a view camera of his own design, perhaps similar to a model [left] designed about 1906 by Dr. Adolf Miethe, whom Prokudin-Gorskii had met previously in Germany.

We know that Prokudin-Gorskii intended his photographic images to be viewed in color because he developed an ingenious photographic technique in order for these images to be captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system [right] involving the same three filters.

A single, narrow glass plate about 3 inches wide by 9 inches long was placed vertically into the camera by Prokudin-Gorskii . He then photographed the same scene three times in a fairly rapid sequence using a red filter, a green filter and a blue filter.
When viewed through Prokudin-Gorskii’s camera, the scene being photographed would have appeared upside down and reversed from its actual orientation.

For the digital process, the original tri-part glass negative is scanned with an overhead digital camera in grayscale mode. Image-editing software converts the scan of the entire plate from negative to positive form. The scan is inverted to represent the original physical orientation.

The entire plate is then reduced to 8-bit grayscale mode. Under magnification, the quality of each image on the plate is reviewed for contrast, degree of color separation, extent of damage to the emulsion, and any other details that might affect the final color composite.

An electronic file is created for each image from the cropped tri-part plate forming three separate “layers” from which the final color composite will be generated. The layers are labeled by color.

the red(R), blue(B), and green(G) layers are aligned forming the “RGB” color composite.

The cropped color composite is adjusted overall to create the proper contrast,
appropriate highlight and shadow detail, and optimal color balance.

Final adjustments may be applied to specific, localized areas of the composite color image to minimize defects associated with over or underexposure, development, or aging of the emulsion of Prokudin-Gorskii’s original glass plate.
The completed color composite is retouched to minimize defects associated with age and incidental damage.