Friday, September 3, 2010

12:26 pm, Bozeman time

A student of mine sent me this link to some really great color photographs taken in various parts of Russia in the early years of the twentieth century. What's especially cool about these shots—other than the fact that they're in color at a time when there was very little color photography—is that they show off the variety of the empire's very diverse population.

Here is what the link sez about the shots:

The photographs of Russian chemist and photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, show Russia on the eve of World War I and the coming of the revolution. From 1909-1912 and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii travelled across the Russian Empire, documenting life, landscapes and the work of Russain people. His images were to be a photographic survey of the time. He travelled in a special train car transformed into a dark room to process his special process of creating color images, a technology that was in its infancy in the early 1900’s. Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia in 1918, after the Russian Revolution had destroyed the Empire he spent years documenting. To learn more about the Prokudin-Gorskii, the process he used to create the color photographs, and see his collection, you can visit the Library of Congress, who purchased his glass negatives in 1948 after his death in 1944.

And here are some of my favorites from the bunch:

Bashkir switchman


You can still find lots of old wooden churches like this in Russia. I have a number of nice wooden church shots in this album (which I've never gotten around to organizing properly, unfortunately).






Greek Russians working in the field









Pretty awesome, eh? Look here to see more. Thanks to Trish for the great link!!!
 
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