Colour Photography Pioneer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

Advanced Technology

Before embarking on his ambitious project to record the "Splendors of Russia in Natural Colours" – supported by Tsar Nicolas II – Prokudin-Gorsky was already devoted to the study and advancement of colour photography; he had studied with some of the most notable scientists in the field and had several significant technological advances to his name.

The photographic technology available at the time did not produce colour images 'straight out of the box', but used the principle of colour separated negatives, recorded using red, green and blue filters. On his journeys around Russia Prokudin-Gorsky used a camera that would record 3 different exposures in (relatively) quick succession on the same glass-plate negative. Each exposure was made with a different coloured filter in front of the lens: red, green and blue. Anyone familiar with digital imaging will notice that this is exactly the same principle used to display images and colours on screen today, where colours are composed out of red, green and blue colour values.

The process of merging the separated negatives back into a single colour image was more challenging than the actual recording process. For presentations, the triple negative was put into a triple-lens projector which had the correct colour filters in front of each lens and merged the red, green and blue elements of the image into a single, full colour image. Prokudin-Gorsky also made prints out of some of his images, but this was an even more daunting process which took about 2-3 days work to produce a single print.

The reproduction limitations are undoubtedly the key to why Prokudin-Gorsky is so little known at the present time. Among the estimated 3500 photos he took, he probably only saw a fraction displayed in colour himself. The collection remained largely unseen right up until the emergence of digital technology. The fact that it only in recent years has become relatively easy to reproduce and fully appreciate his work can serve as a testament to just how far ahead of his time he was. And just to prove how technically advanced these images are: all of the colour images featured on this page have been created simply by pasting the blue, green and red elements from scans of Prokudin-Gorsky's original glass negatives into the appropriate colour channels in Photoshop and aligning them. No colour/contrast adjustments from his original exposures whatsoever!

Historically significant

From a historical point of view Prokudin-Gorsky captured the Russian Empire at a very significant time, at the eve of World War I and just before the Russian revolution of 1917. By the time he left Russia in 1918 – taking most of his negatives with him – Tsar Nicolay II and his family were dead, and Russia was a very different place.

The entire surviving collection of glass negatives, some 1900 triple negatives, were purchased by the US Library of Congress in 1948. Coinciding with the exhibition The Empire That Was Russia all of these images have recently been digitized, and are in the public domain, both in triple-negative and full colour form.

Links:

» The Russian Prokudin-Gorsky site
» The Šechtl a Voseček Museum's  Prokudin-Gorsky exhibition
» The digitized Prokudin-Gorsky collecion at the Library of Congress

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