WHAT DO THIS WOMAN & THIS MAN HAVE IN COMMON?
A. THEY ARE THE NEXT REALITY STARS CHOSEN TO BE IN MTV'S SPRING SHOW JERSEY SHORE: EUROPEAN VACATION
B. THEY HAVE BEEN WRITING LOVE LETTERS FOR 2 DECADES AND FINALLY GOT MARRIED AFTER FINDING EACH OTHER ON FACEBOOK
C. BOTH THESE PHOTOGRAPHS WERE TAKEN IN THE EARLY 1900'S
D. THESE WERE ANNIE LEIBOVITZ'S FIRST PORTRAITS WHICH JUST FETCHED OVER $15 MILLION AT SOTHEBY'S NYC
I know you are just on the EDGE OF YOUR SEAT wondering what the answer is.....
I'll give you a hint:
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| Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara early 1900 |
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| Model, 1905 |
I find this incredibly fascinating. For us, color photographs are the norm. Actually, high-definition color is now the norm. When I look at photographs taken in 1900, I feel so disconnected to the people and the times not only because of the different fashions and styles, but also because the photographs were pretty rustic, that I have an image in my mind that life at that time as flat, not glossy and vibrant like it is now.
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| Russian child in 1910/image: foxtunge/flickr ABOVE IS A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1910, AND THIS TO ME IS WHAT LIFE LOOKED LIKE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, PROBABLY BECAUSE BLACK & WHITE IMAGES SUCH AS THIS ONE ARE WHAT WE ARE ACCUSTOMED TO SEEING. |
THIS IS A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN AT THE SAME TIME, ALSO IN RUSSIA, BUT IN COLOR BY PROKUDIN-GORSKY. All of a sudden I connect to this one, because now I can see the bright colors in the dress and the detail in the girls' faces. If I hadn't of known what year this was taken, I would swear it was from a LIFE Magazine taken this year. It's amazing how much seeing an image in color changes our perspective. The opposite is also true. Seeing an image in black & white also changes our perspective.
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| Group of workers harvesting tea in Chakva. Photo taken by Prokudin-Gorsky at the turn of the century |
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| Autumn Village in Gorki, Borodino, 1911. Prokudin-Gorsky |
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| Emir Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, the last Emir of Bukhara, now modern day Uzbekistan. Alim Khan was the last emir to have any local power. The dynasty was abolished by the Bolsheviks. From here. |
*Prokudin-Gorsky's own research yielded patents for producing color film slides and for projecting color motion pictures. His process used a camera that took a series of three monochrome pictures in sequence, each through a different-colored filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly colored light, it was possible to reconstruct the original color scene. Any stray movement within the camera's field of view showed up in the prints as multiple "ghosted" images, since the red, green and blue images were taken of the subject at slightly different times.
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| Composite of Alleia Hamerops by Prokudin-Gorsky showing the color process |
**Each exposure, which would usually take anything between three and six seconds, was made with a different coloured filter in front of the lens: red, green and blue.
The triple negatives would then be laid on top of one another and placed in a projector that created a single, full-colour composite.
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| Photograph by: Prokudin-Gorsky, circa 1905-1910 *Around 1905, Prokudin-Gorsky envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advances that had been made in color photography to document the Russian Empire systematically. Through such an ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical color projections" of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire. |
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| Photohraph by Prokudin-Gorsky taken of an unknown man, circa 1905-1915 |
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| Leo Tolstoy **It is thought that Russia's first published colour portrait, taken by Prokudin-Gorsky in 1908, is a picture of Leo Tolstoy dressed in a blue shirt and reclining in a white wicker chair at Yasnaya Polyana, the writer's much-loved home. *The exposure time of the frames is likely to have varied, even if the developed negatives were later on similar glass plates. In a letter to Leo Tolstoy requesting a photo session, Prokudin-Gorsky described each photo as taking one to three seconds, but, when recollecting his time with Tolstoy, he described a six-second exposure on a sunny day. Blaise Agüera y Arcas estimated the exposure of a 1909 photo taken in broad daylight to have had combined exposures of over a minute, using the movement of the moon as comparison. **The Tsar was so impressed by the photographer's camera that he gave him permission to travel across the empire. |
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| The Waterfall Kivach, Sunah River, 1915. Prokudin-Gorsky Now that I know the process of his photography, it makes this image above even more interesting to me. When I first saw it, I thought that the water looked like velvet. Now I know it's because of the time between each sequence in which he took this image that the water's movement became blurred, and I think the effect is magical. |
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| Zindan Prison in Bukhara, 1907 |
What I also find interesting about the scope of his work, is that we get to see every aspect of life in Eastern Europe, not just the nobility. He shows us writers, prisoners, farmers, workers, poets, tsars, military, and children. The list goes on. From these color photographs, I really get a sense for life in his country at this time, more than any black & white image could give me.
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| Joiners Shop for Dressing Sheath, circa 1905-1915 |
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| Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, Self-Portrait on the Korolistskai River, 1915 |
*It has been estimated from Prokudin-Gorsky's personal inventory that before leaving Russia, he had about 3500 negatives. Upon leaving the country and exporting 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-Gorsky's notes, the photos left behind were not of interest to the general public. Some of Prokudin-Gorsky's negatives were given away,and some he hid on his departure. Outside the Library of Congress collection, none have yet been found.
Due to the difficulty in reproducing prints of sufficient quality from the negatives, only some hundred were used for exhibits, books and scholarly articles after the Library of Congress acquired them. The best-known is perhaps the 1980 coffee table book Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II, where the photos were combined from black-and-white prints of the negatives.
* information quoted from Wikipedia
** information quoted from Independent.co.uk
