Early Color Photography No. 2
Vintage Camping No. 3
Nochevka u kamni a na beregu Chusovo(Translation: Night camp by a rock on the bank of the Chusovaia)
1912, Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky
Documenting the Russian Empire in Color1, 2
Outfitted with a specially equipped railroad-car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire’s bureaucracy, Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky documented the Russian Empire between around 1909 and 1915. He conducted many illustrated lectures of his work. His photographs offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming Russian Revolution. 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.
- “Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.” Wikipedia, as last edited September 8, 2021. Accessed October, 2, 2021. https://en.wikipedia….Prokudin-Gorsky.
- In the photographic process used by Prokudin-Gorsky, “the visible spectrum of colors was divided into three channels of information by capturing it in the form of three black-and-white photographs, one taken through a red filter, one through a green filter, and one through a blue filter. The resulting three photographs could be projected through filters of the same colors and exactly superimposed on a screen, synthesizing the original range of color additively; or viewed as an additive color image by one person at a time through an optical device known generically as a chromoscope or photochromoscope, which contained colored filters and transparent reflectors that visually combined the three into one full-color image; or used to make photographic or mechanical prints in the complementary colors cyan, magenta and yellow, which, when superimposed, reconstituted the color subtractively.”
