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Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. Self portrait on the Karolitskhali River, 1915

Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky (Russian: Серге́й Миха́йлович Проку́дин-Го́рский (help·info), August 31, 1863, Murom – September 27, 1944, Paris) devoted his career to the advancement of photography. Prokudin-Gorsky was born in Murom in what is now Vladimir Oblast, Russia and educated as a chemist.^[1] He studied with renowned scientists in St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Paris, and developed early techniques for taking color photographs.

His own original research yielded patents for producing color film slides and for projecting color motion pictures. Around 1905, Prokudin-Gorsky envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advancements that had been made in color photography to systematically document the Russian Empire. 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.

His process used a camera that took a series of monochrome pictures in rapid 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.

He also successfully experimented with making color prints of the photographs, but the process was complicated and slow. It was only with the advent of digital image processing that the images could be satisfactorily combined into one. ^[2]

Outfitted with a specially equipped railroad car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II, and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire's bureaucracy, Prokudin-Gorsky documented the Russian Empire around 1909 through 1915. He conducted many illustrated lectures of his work.

His photographs offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming Russian revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population.

Crop from Alleia Hamerops showing the red, green and blue colour channels as well as the composite image.

Prokudin-Gorsky left Russia in 1918, going first to Norway and England before settling in Paris, France, where he died in 1944. By then, the tsar and his family had been executed during the Russian Revolution, and the Communist rule had been established over what was once the Russian Empire. His unique images of Russia on the eve of the revolution—recorded on glass plates—were purchased by the United States' Library of Congress in 1948 from his heirs.^[1]

In 2001, the Library of Congress produced an exhibition, The Empire that was Russia. For this exhibition, the glass plates were scanned and color images were produced digitally from the scanned red, green, and blue monochrome images, using a process called Digichromatography which was developed by Walter Frankhauser.

In 2004, the Library contracted with Blaise Agüera y Arcas to produce an automated color composite of each of the 1,902 negatives from the high resolution digital images of the glass plate negatives. A complete description of his process and a list of other sites that have prepared digital color composite images are in the collection profile at the Library of Congress.^[3][4]

Monastery of St. Nilus on Stolbny Island in Lake Seliger near Ostashkov, ca. 1910	Alim Khan (1880–1944), emir of Bukhara	Early color photograph as part of Sergey's work to document the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915	An undated color photograph between 1905 and 1915
Chalice in the vestry of the Ipatevskii Monastery in Kostroma, 1911	Austro-Hungarian POWs in Russia, 1915	The mid-18th century Trinity Monastery in Tyumen, ca. 1912

• Albert Kahn, a patron of photography, who funded photographers to travel around the world recording colour images and cine film of diverse ethnic societies between 1909 and 1931.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

• Collection Profile at the Library of Congress
• Library of Congress exhibit, The Empire that was Russia (selection of items)
• Search page to access all Prokudin-Gorskii items at the Library of Congress
• Prokudin-Gorskii images presented by the Library of Congress' English-Russian project Meeting of Frontiers
• Russian database with all the Prokudin-Gorskii photos, including those not yet restored
• Private Prokudin-Gorskii project by Frank Dellaert
• Another privately compiled Prokudin-Gorskii gallery
• Prokudin-Gorskii's pictures of Tolstoy - on the University of Toronto's Tolstoy Studies site
• On-line exhibit of Prokudin-Gorskii at Šechtl and Voseček Museum of Photography
• Digichromatography: Restoring Prokudin-Gorskii's Photographs
• Interview with ORLANDO FIGES, who produced a documentary about Gorsky for the BBC
• Margaret Dikovitskaya, "Central Asia in Early Photographs: Russian Colonial Attitudes and Visual Culture," http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/coe21/publish/no14_ses/contents.html