Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorskii (Серге́й Миха́йлович Проку́дин-Го́рский) was a Russian chemist and photographer, best known for his pioneering colour photography from early 20th Century Russia. Some time around 1905, Prokudin-Gorskii created a plan to use the emerging technology in colour photography to systematically document the Russian Empire. Through this ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia about the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the Russian Empire.
He set off with a specially equipped railroad-car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II and with special permits that granted him access to restricted areas, as well as cooperation from the Empire’s bureaucracy, Prokudin-Gorskii thus documented the Russian Empire between 1909 and 1915. His photographs offer a vivid portrait of a lost world on the eve of World War I and the oncoming Russian Revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of this emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia’s sundry population.
Before leaving Russia, Prokudin-Gorskii’s personal inventory is estimated to have been about 3500 negatives. While leaving the country and attempting to export all his photographic material, about half of the photos were confiscated by Russian authorities for containing material that was strategically sensitive for war-time Russia. According to Prokudin-Gorskii’s notes, the photos that he left behind were not of interest to the general public. Some of Prokudin-Gorskii’s negatives were merely given away, while some he hid on his departure. He and his family eventually settled in Paris. Apart from those in the possession of the American Library of Congress collection, no other examples of his work have yet been found.
By the time Prokudin-Gorskii’s death, the tsar and his family had long since been executed during the Russian Revolution, and Communist rule had been established over what was once the Russian Empire. The surviving boxes of photo albums and fragile glass plates the negatives were recorded on were finally stored in the basement of a Parisian apartment building, and the family was worried about their getting damaged. The United States Library of Congress purchased the material from Prokudin-Gorskii’s heirs in 1948 for $3500–$5000 on the initiative of a researcher inquiring into their whereabouts.
The twilight of the Russia Empire was a time of incredible transition in the country. With the onset of industrialization, class lines were starting to blur, and dissatisfaction with the tsar was spreading. Capturing the ethos of that moment was Prokudin-Gorskii, shooting colour photos (a technology still in its infancy) through a method of his own invention. He took three consecutive photographs of his subjects with three separate filters – red, green, and blue – and then combined them into full-color projections, thereby capturing a huge range of architecture, infrastructure, and people. Here are some of the more stunning examples of his work.
