If you were to look at this photograph, considering its colours and quality, around what time
do you think it was taken?
Certainly not over 110 years ago, right?
Now what I find so fascinating is that in the past photographs, especially colourized
photographs, exerted an incredible amount of power.
This photograph of a Muslim man, with his sheated dagger, traditional dress, headgear
and decorated with a medal, seems like it was taken in the past couple of years in terms
of quality.
Well, this photograph was taken well over a century ago in Dagestan, part of the former
Russian Empire.
And throughout centuries empires have risen and fallen - one of the last European empires
to fall was the Russian Empire, by revolution during the First World War.
It just so happened that around a decade before this revolution the Russian Czar Nicholas
II commissioned a photographer, one that pioneered colourized photography, to travel through
the Russian Empire and capture the way of life and its religious buildings, infrastructure,
normal people living in it and its landscapes.
Many of those photographs have been preserved, and honestly, they’re of incredible quality.
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Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky
Born in the Russian Empire in 1863, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky initially worked
as a chemist and engineer.
What he became known for, however, is the fact he was one of the first photographers
able to shoot and display colourized photographs.
Between 1905 and 1915, that’s over 100 years ago and before the First World War and the
Bolshevik Revolution tore Russia apart, Prokudin traveled all over the Russian Empire.
His travels and photography were commissioned by the Russian Czar Nicholas II, a keen photographer
himself.
He wanted to see the diversity, and seek the identity, of his empire.
The mission could be compared to how the US Congress commissioned the photographing and
documenting of the settling West of the frontier.
Prokudin toured Russia in a special railway carriage, equipped with darkroom facilities
in order to develop his photographs.
He captured not just landscape scenes and infrastructure, but religious structures and
normal people all over the Empire.
He created, in a sense, a record of Russia’s domains.
Through his lens he captured the memorable images of a country that was moving inexorably
toward industrialization, war and revolution, Nicky Gardner writes.
Take this image for example, a Turkmen man with his camel.
The colour and quality of the photograph is incredible.
It portrays Russia in a very different light than a black-and-white old photograph would.
Like so many we have that portray the Russian Revolution, for example.
Prokudin made his way through European Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Urals and
Western Siberia with his railway carriage.
The photographs in colour of the ancient temples, such as this one of the mosque in Bukhara,
taken in 1911, and monuments, bridges and factories, views of distant towns and villages,
landscapes, mountains and deserts are testament to the thousands of miles he traveled in an
attempt to capture the full extent of the Russian Empire.
He prolifically photographed the diverse native peoples of the regions he traveled through
as well.
It left us with incredible colourized portraits of what normal life was like in the Russian
Empire over 100 years ago.
This photograph of a dagestani couple shows not just their traditional clothing, but the
background is incredible, the vast mountains.
There are photographs of curious scenes of life as well.
I mean, this guard that could not be less interested in the photographer, and the men
crowded in that small underground prison, somewhere in Uzbekistan.
And these females from a little village and their colourful traditional dresses manage
to capture the imagination of what life was like back then.
Now, Prokudin had a special way of developing his photographs, using a three-colour plate
system.
He could be considered a pioneer in the way he adapted this system, though he didn’t
come up with it himself.
The German inventor Adolph Miethe had invented the three-colour method, and Prokudin improved
it.
Miethe’s version required lots of assistants and heavy equipment.
It wasn’t failsafe and was rather difficult to work with and actually practice photography
with.
With Prokudin’s adaptations, however, it meant Prokudin could produce these colourized
photographs at a time when this was most unusual, especially in Russia.
Fortunately for us, it left us with photographs such as this one, a man holding a hookah,
over 100 years ago.
The pictures you’re seeing are colourized photographs of ordinary men, women, but also
Khans and Ministers from Russia’s territory before the onslaught of the First World War.
It shows the vast amount of diversity in the empire, both in architecture and clothing.
The colour adds a special dimension to it.
In my opinion, it shows Russia as a colourful and lively country.
Even a scene such as these windmills in the Yalutorovsk district of Tobolsk allow for
doubt whether this was taken over a century ago, or simply a couple of months ago somewhere
in rural Russia.
I personally think it is absolutely incredible these pictures exist, I’d say it’s a window
that allows you to travel back in time and immerse yourself in the Russian Empire as
it was, a hundred years ago, albeit for a little while.
This view of the Nilova Monastery in the Tver Province with its bright colours might as
well have been a painting, a photograph of a fantasy scene.
Prokudin captured the photographs of people that were already famous during that time.
There is a 1908 lithograph of Count Lev Tolstoy, the writer, considered one of the greatest
of all time.
The lithograph of Tolstoy was referred to by a Russian journal as “the first Russian
colour photoportrait”.
This photograph of Alim Khan, the last Emir of the Uzbek Manghit Dynasty before the Soviet
Red Army overthrew him and installed a puppet government, is one of the few, if not only
surviving photograph of him.
Considering his colourful and rich attire I cannot help but think of all that has been
lost by history, because of the lack of photography and film equipment.
Anyway, these photographs just go to show how revolutionary and pioneering Prokudin’s
work was.
That is not to say the Russians didn’t have any photographs.
In fact, households too poor to afford paintings often hung hand-coloured black-and-white photos
from their wall.
As Russia industrialized, walls in households were decorated with tinted pictures of not
just people and portraits, but, of the new technology as well.
This photograph of Alternators, inside the Hindu Kush Hydro Power Plant, in today’s
Turkmenistan, was the largest hydro power plant of the Russian Empire.
Once again, the quality of the photograph is astonishing.
Sergei and the Revolution
After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 set Russia on a path of chaos and internal bloodshed,
and the assassination of Czar Nicholas II and his family, Prokudin fled the country
in mid-1918.
Traveling through Finland, Norway, England and France, he eventually settled in Paris.
He lived up until 1944, meaning he lived through the majority of the Second World War as well.
4 years after he passed away, in 1948, the United States Library of Congress purchased
Prokudin’s photographs from his son.
It cost them around $4000 for the complete 1,900 glass-plate negatives and 14 albums
with black-and-white contact prints that survived the war.
It was not until far into the ‘90s, over half a century later, that the technology
was developed that allowed for the digitalisation of these photographs.
Reason for this was the fact that the technology of developing colour photography advanced
in a different direction than Prokudin’s method.
His method was left “orphaned”, as Harold Leich describes.
The digitalisation is exactly why the pictures we have seen in this video appear so crisp
and modern.
After the fall of the last Czar and the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union managed to utilize
colourized photographs as a propaganda tool for their invention of the new man and society.
I’ll personally take this colourful photograph of a melon vendor on an Uzbekistani market
over the traditional Soviet worker in an old factory any day.
As for colour photography, while Prokudin was a pioneer, rapid advancements were being
made around the world during his time.
Auguste and Louis Lumière, the brothers that are regarded as pioneers in both film-making
and photography, invented an autochrome system.
They patented this system in 1903 and it allowed colourized photographs to be taken.
Around the time Prokudin was touring through Russia in his carriage the Lumiere brothers’
autochrome system arrived in Russia.
While Prokudin did not start experimenting with this system, after all, that’s why
it took so long for his photographs to become available to the public, another Russian photographer
did.
The amateur photographer and rather wealthy nobleman that started experimenting with the
autochrome system was Pyotr Vedenisov.
The photographs you’re seeing on screen right now are taken by him, and in all honesty,
even though they’re over 100 years old it is just the clothing style that gives it away,
right?
I mean, this picture of the two women with the blue and red umbrella..
It could have been taken during the ‘30s or even ‘70s or ‘80s with this quality,
clarity and composition.
But no, these photographs by Vedenisov show a Russia that was soon to brutally cease to
exist because of the First World War and Russian Revolution.
His photographs, such as this woman under the roses, have a different tint and feeling
to it than Prokudin’s photographs.
They’re impressive nonetheless though, especially considering they’re over a century old as
well.
We’re coming to a close of this video about photographs that gave us some insight in what
life was like in the Russian Empire, right before its collapse.
I mentioned the Library of Congress bought the photographs from Prokudin’s son after
the Second World War.
The reason I discovered these photographs was the fact that an article was published
about the Library of Congress publishing the photographs, bought in 1948, online.
They are available and in the public domain on their website.
There are many, many more than the ones I have showed in this video and I think it’s
well-worth it to check it out.
I’ll leave the link in the description if you’re interested in more of Prokudin’s
work.
I certainly found it fascinating to look through and get a real feeling of what people lived
and looked like back then.
Thank you for watching this video and is there a person or event that you would like to know
more about, and perhaps see a video of?
Let me know your thoughts in a comment and if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing
to my channel.
See you next time!