Dreamy Technicolor Russians From 1908!

Thanks to “MM” who called my attention to the Library of Congress’ mind-blowing exhibition of color photographs commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II at the turn of the last century. The photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, used an innovative process involving multiple plates for each image, and the images were presented as projections rather than prints. The process is not the mind-blowing part, though. What really is striking about these images is the way they force you to feel more immediately connected to the past. The rich color in these images forces you to think about the way black and white has become a mental filter that distances us from the subject of an image. The Fabric Merchant he photographed in 1911 seems just as alive as photographs I took with my digital camera last week. (No disrespect to last week’s companions intended).