Brilliant Full Photos of Pre-WWI Russia (yes, they're real)

[liberalpragmatist]

I'd never seen these before but they blew me away. I'm sure some of you are familiar with these already, but I figure most of you probably are not.

In the Pre-WWI Russian Empire, a photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, developed a technique to develop color photos. He stored the negatives on glass slides. They were later acquired by the Library of Congress, where they were developed.

A full explanation is here: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html


Peasant Girls, 1909


The Emir of Bukhara, 1911


View of the Monastery from the Solarium, 1910


View of Suzdal' from the Kamenka River, 1912


The Cathedral of the Nativity of the Holy Mother of God in Ipatevskii Monastery, 1910
(destroyed by the Soviets)


Three Generations, 1910


Ekaterinin Spring, ca. 1907-1915



http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

You can also do a search of the entire collection. Not all his pictures are potential color photographs and not all of the ones that are have been transfered to color prints. But you can still see several, like the last one, that have been, even if they haven't been cleaned up for exhibition.

[bertha katzenengel]

1. Remarkable!

Thanks, lib-prag. :bounce: Fantastic.

[fishwax]

2. yeah, those are fantastic

I had seen them before, but thanks for sharing them and reminding me of them again. The first time I saw them, they very much blew me away, and I love seeing them again.

You might also be interested in these color pictures of WWI ... like the Russian prints, they were designed as color photographs, though they used a different technology (involving dyed potato grains): http://www.poiemadesign.com/wwi/

[liberalpragmatist]

3. Ha! I just posted that same link in a WWI-thread I have in GD

Yeah, I've been looking at both of those. They're remarkable; really bring home the war, which for so many of us just exists as a grainy black-and-white world a long time ago.

[fishwax]

5. cool!

They're remarkable; really bring home the war

i agree ... such a stark difference from the grainy b/w ... I first found the WWI pictures and th eRussia pictures at about the same time, and (I don't know how to say this without it coming off as rather corny, but) it really changed the way I look/think about the world (or at least the past :))

[liberalpragmatist]

14. What I love about these...

... is how poignant they are. You're right about them really bringing the past to life. Yeah, it sounds corny, but it's really true in this case.

And given the resulting 5 decades of terror in Russia (WWI, The Collapse of the Russian Empire, The Communist Revolution, the Russian Civil War, Collectivisation, Stalin's reign of terror, the destruction of old cultures and forced removals, WWII) that they still haven't recovered from, it's really almost sad.



What became of these children, for instance? Who survived? Who didn't? Looking at these pictures is like a calm before the storm. We know what's coming to them. They don't.

[fishwax]

16. that really is poignant

and I haven't seen that particular picture before. What you said is definitely true.

Good stuff ...

[Ms. Toad]

30. It's almost as if

since we've only seen black and white photographs our mind believes the world itself was black and white - or at least closer to some of the post processing colorized ones which run to pastels - or to the colors of the faded clothing that we see in museums.

The vivid colors don't seem as if they belong to that era.

[Strawman]

4. Those are amazing!

Very interesting!

[Gold Metal Flake]

6. From the description, it's similar to Technicolor.

The negative images on black/white plates (or film) are made in rapid succession with colored filters (red, green & blue). Technicolor uses a single lens, then a three-way splitter to three B/W magazines through filters (yellow, cyan and magenta).

The cool thing about these processes is b/w film is much more stable than the color films of the past. That is why fresh prints of Technicolor negatives look so vibrant after all these years. I had never seen the pictures, and they are amazing. I have never seen photographs of this time period before that looked so real, so life-like. The old b/w photos still lack a clarity that makes it difficult to put myself there.

Thanks for this post!

:toast:

Edit: it's not "are made at once by three lenses"

[Orsino]

32. Cool. I was assuming...

...that these must be hand-tinted. So vibrant!

[Gold Metal Flake]

33. I forgot to comment on the print process.

See, the gegatives of both this process and Technicolor are on b/w stock, but the image is taken through colored filters. The color info is there, if you print the fil through the same color lenses. The print process is the reverse of the capture process. Just print from the negative through colored lenses. It works great, and the images do not fade from the b/w negative stock.

Some early color processes were hand tinted, but these are real color.

[amerikat]

7. Wow! Great stuff thanks for the Link.(nt)

[fizzgig]

8. those are beautiful

the colors in the first two are simply amazing

thanks so much for the link

[asthmaticeog]

9. Thank you for posting these, they're lovely! n/t

[Metta]

10. Clutch the pearls!

Whew. These are *wonderful*. I'm getting lost in them. Hubba hubba. Many thanks.

[Mr. McD]

11. Thanks for the post

Very interesting.

[Zookeeper]

12. Those are stunning!

Although, they seem unreal after seeing only b&w from that era.

I will share them with my family. Thanks for the link!

[liberalpragmatist]

13. Not just black-and-white either

WWI and pre-WWI photos also have graininess and a lack of clarity that is stunningly absent in these photos. Now, part of it is that these photos have been redeveloped digitally from the negatives. But still, it's pretty remarkable - these photos could have been taken yesterday.

[haydukelives]

15. Nice find

Thanks

[Indy_Dem_Defender]

17. View of the Monastery from the Solarium, 1910

All I have to say is this is an unbelieveable picture, it doesn't even look real!

[Moochy]

24. Little Fluffly Clouds

This one reminded me of 'Little Fluffy Clouds' by the Orb!

What was the sky like when you were little?
It was, it went on for ever, and ever. and there were these little fluffy clouds.

What were the stars like when you were young?

– They went on forever. They... When I... We lived in Arizona, and the skies always had these little fluffy clouds in them. And they were long, clear, and there were lots of stars at night. And when it would rain, they would all turn – they were beautiful, the most beautiful skies, as a matter of fact. Um, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire, and the clouds would catch the colors everywhere. That's, uh, neat cause I used to look at them all the time when I was little. You don't see that. You might still see it in the desert.

[StellaBlue]

18. WOW.

I am amazed at how much more immediate these photos seem than b&w ones would. Especially the Cathedral and the Spring, because of the afternoon light. They look like you could just walk right into them. I think I am having some kind of space-time-continuum revelation. What would it be like if we had photos of medieval Europe or ancient Rome or China or pre-Columbian Native Americans? Just wow.

[Moochy]

19. Thanks so much for posting these

They really do look incredible I must say. :hi:

[Robeson]

20. Great pics....

...thanks for posting..

[Redstone]

21. Absolutely astonishing. From that era, you expect to see hand-painted

pictures at best...seems as though this guy sort of stole a march on Kodachrome with his technique, yes?

Redstone

[Aristus]

22. My God! What beautiful photographs!

Amazing! :wow:

I concur with the other opinions that mention our collective perception of the pre-World War I era as being grainy black-and-white. The clarity and color of the photos really bring this era to life again. I swear, they seem like stills from a movie set or something. The people actually live (or lived, I suppose) You look at them and see human beings, not gray, cardboard cutout facsimilies of people. Something else black-and-white does is force you to look at the strange clothes and odd hats. With color, you look at the people, and the intervening years vanish. They are flesh-and-blood, breathing people.

Again I say: Amazing!

[liberalpragmatist]

25. Check out the link in Post #2

They represent another color photo technique developed by the French Lumiere brothers. A number of color photos were taken with the French army on the Western Front.

They're a little grainier, and not as vivid as the Russia ones. But they're still pretty stunning and really bring the Western Front alive.

IMO, these photos bring alive WWI even more than color photos of WWII would (there are plenty of color photos of WWII), the reason being that WWII I think is engrained in our consciousness as being the dawn of our modern era. World War II doesn't seem so ancient and so distant. We all know people who lived during World War II, many who fought during WWII, and given the huge role WWII has played on the American psyche, there's so much reproduction of it in art, movies like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, and television series like Band of Brothers.

World War I has sort of been eclipsed, at least in the American mind. And it just seems so much more distant from WWII. Maybe I'm wrong, but the first thirty or forty years of the century seem a lot more distant than the post-Depression, post-WWII part of the century. These photos really bring alive that time.

I wish there were more pictures of the big cities of Russia, most of which were completely destroyed and redeveloped by Stalin. It looks like Prokudin-Gorskii's assignment was to document the vast reaches of the Empire, hence all the Central Asian pictures, etc.

[Crazy Guggenheim]

23. Too much for words.

[sleipnir]

26. Thanks for posting!

This website and artist will go in my file. It's quite likely that I will use his work as research for design projects or for pure inspiration. Thanks! I'm very happy to see these amazing images of ourselves at a different time and a different place. The world sometimes feels much larger, but then you see the details that bring it all together again.

Thanks!

[CanuckAmok]

27. Wow, that's neat. Thanks for posting!

[Jamison]

28. Those are nice!

That's a country I've always wanted to visit.

[liberalpragmatist]

29. Kicking this for the morning folks

:kick:

Also, here's the full archive of prints the LoC owns. Only a relative handful were cleaned up and fully restored for display, but the remaining ones are still pretty amazing.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/p?pp/prok:@band(color+composite)

[eyepaddle]

31. That is remarkable

thanks for posting this.

[bif]

34. They're available in a book

I think it's called "Photographs for the Czar"