The Incredible Century Old Color Photography of Prokudin-Gorsky

1. Ashley
   June 17th, 2009 at 11:47 pm

   Wow, that really is incredible. It's hard for my mind to reconcile color photographs with 100 years ago. Wonderful find, thanks for sharing.

2. Allen
   June 18th, 2009 at 12:22 am

   Another cool thing is that most of Prokudin-Gorskii collection is owned by the Library of Congress, and they have it all digitized, color-corrected and online! Check it out:

   http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/p?pp/prok:@field(NUMBER+prok)::Sor tBy=CALL

3. Hannah
   June 18th, 2009 at 12:34 am

   Hmm, there's a problem with Allen's link, but here is another one where you can view the whole collection:

   http://www.prokudin-gorsky.ru

4. Kitanne
   June 18th, 2009 at 1:12 am

   This was at the Russian Museum here in Minneapolis (yes, we have a Russian museum! In a beautiful old Spanish church no less) last year or two ago. They showed the photos in the three layers stacked together and back lit. Very very cool.

5. Kalel
   June 18th, 2009 at 1:24 am

   I didn't realize that there were so many colored people back then.

6. Foreigner1
   June 18th, 2009 at 4:17 am

   For years as a child I had this weird idea that the Past was in black and white. Yes I knew that colour always must have been there. But when you saw photographs, the older they were, the more black and white they were. With the occasional hand-coloured ones as exeptions. So somehow it stuck in my mind that the past like those past wars and my grandparents and such somehow was lived in black and white.
   To see any of the oldest possible photographs gives an eery insight as if looking through some timewarp into that past. These colourpictures give that effect even stronger.

   Because of those old pictures, I had the idea that the faces of people from then looked different from today's people- that you could somehow recognise a face of someone of a past century if he or she was walking in todays clothes in todays crowd- that he or she would stand out somehow.
   Te colourpictures also show that people in that past apart from their clothing look just like people now.

   To me they show that it is only technique and culture that has developed- changed over the decades- not the people themselves.

   So eery... Fascinating.

7. Miss Cellania
   June 18th, 2009 at 4:58 am

   The past WAS black and white, kiddies... because we couldn't AFFORD color! Yep, and we WALKED miles to school uphill both ways, ate beans three times a day, memorized the entire constitution in second grade, and went to work for six cents an hour as soon as we finished sixth grade.

   And we LIKED it!

8. GQ
   June 18th, 2009 at 6:33 am

   These are absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for sharing this link.

9. Jim
   June 18th, 2009 at 7:02 am

   Here's another guy - interesting in his own right. He lived next door to my maternal Grandmother in Waddington NY. When he died, his widow gave my Mother's family a lot of memoribilia including boxes of the 3-D photos and a "magic lantern" to view them. As a kid we looked at a lot of those slides in our kitchen projected on the refrigerator. I have a hand carved table from India which was given to me through my late Mother. My sister has an artifact from the Empress of China's palace. The 3-D photos were given by my Mother to a museum in New Jersey.

   here is a link:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ricalton

10. swss
    June 18th, 2009 at 10:39 am

    Awesome! This is why I love Neatorama- thanks so much for the link!

11. Tom Taborda
    June 18th, 2009 at 11:12 am

    Tecnicolor uses the same procedure: 3 B&W negatives

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor

    'Gone with the Wind' was shot using 3 B&W Negatives
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031381/trivia

12. sid
    June 18th, 2009 at 2:56 pm

    Who?

13. gibson8or
    June 18th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

    I love the coat that the Emir of Bukhara is wearing in one of the pictures. I think the perception of the past being in black and white or faded colors isn't just because of black and white photography, but also because old paintings, color photos, and artifacts have faded with time. What you see in museums had been degraded by sunlight and time, and I think that really affects what we imagine the past to have looked like.

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