![[photo of a Russian church]](http://www.teleread.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/03/prokudin-11.jpg)
Looking at the photograph above, how old would you guess it is? Of course, me asking this question should make suspicion well up in you like a simile in Ben Elton. But if I had not asked the question, and you were to have to base your guess on colour, sharpness, composition, choice of subject, et cetera?
The photograph was in fact taken in 1915 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944), Russian inventor and photographer to the Tsar. It portrays the Church of the Ressurection in Kostroma, Russia, and is part of an online exhibition at the USA Library of Congress which started in 2003.
![[portrait of Prokudin-Gorskii]](http://www.teleread.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/03/portrait-sergei_prokudin_gorskii.jpg)
Self-portrait of Prokudin-Gorskii.Prokudin-Gorskii invented a type of colour photography that involved taking three different photos in rapid succession of the same scene, using blue, red and green filters. By projecting the three channels through the same filters, he could reconstruct the very life-like photographs.
Tsar Nicholas II, who saw promise in this technology, paid Prokudin-Gorskii to travel through Russia and Europe in order to register what he saw. The result were thousands of plates, of buildings, people, and technology, of a quality surpassing what else was available at the time.
In 1918, after the Russian revolution, Prokudin-Gorskii left his country, and he took his plates with him. Those portraying politically sensitive subjects were confiscated at the border by the communist regime. In 1946 the Library of Congress bought the remaining plates from Sergei’s heirs.
A Project Gutenberg perspective
Recently, there has been a movement among Project Gutenberg volunteers to preserve images in the books we scan, and to include them in HTML versions. Many volunteers do their best to make these images look as good as they can, but in the case of photographs the images look old. Only drawings seem to come out fresh and new. It is not just what’s on the photographs that looks old, it is the photographs themselves. They have this lonely, gritty quality, as if the world itself was tired in those slow days.
![[photo of a road-side wooden fence in front of a house]](http://www.teleread.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/03/prokudin-2.jpg)
But add a splash of realistic colour, and you find yourself staring through a time machine, the then becoming the now. If houses were made of stone in nineteenth century Missouri, the fence above could have been one that young Tom Sawyer had sat upon.
An incredible amount of luck not just made sure that these amazing windows into the early twentieth century were preserved, but that they were also made available to us to study, rip, mix and burn.
Although obviously a lot of work went into the LoC’s restoration effort, many of the results are far from perfect, making it a challenge to improve these images even further. The LoC provides both an explanation of how the restoration process works and high-resolution scans of all the photos. Now if only my PC had four times the memory…
(Via Yuri Vorontsov.)
Doesn’t take a whole lot of memory; I worked through it back when I had 64 meg.
http://www.najakito.com/~john/Tutorials/
My Mac with 256 MB screeches to a halt when I try to do anything other than load the pictures. But I’ll try with my PC when I have the time, because it’s still something I wish to do.
Via Wikipedia I found an interesting website where somebody has taken photographs around Ostashkov at (almost) the exact same locations as where Prokudin-Gorskii took them, so that you can compare the now with the then.
It’s also interesting to see that the Wikihivemind will use photos that old. To me that says something about the quality of the work.
After meticulous scanning of the entire collection of glass plate negatives, hundred twenty-two images of the 1,922 glass plates in the stewardship of the Library of Congress were restored for the 2003 exhibition using Photoshop software to 1) achieve very close registration of the three images comprising one image and 2) to remove glitches in the emulsion layer (the plates were transported from Russia to Paris and stored in deep cellars there during WWII). See: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html
Subsequently, the entire collection was rendered in color via a pixel-mapping program; in these renderings, the defects in the emulsion were not corrected. See: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/prokhtml/prokcompos.html
The result is all images were rendered in color, but only 122 were pristine, by today’s standards.
Prokudin-Gorskii’s technique was superior to anything else at the time but disregarded internationally. His sense of composition and meticulous craft using relatively crude devices has left us a stunning color time capsule of the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire.
I became fascinated with the collection in 1996 and promoted its scanning and rendering in color; the exhibition represents one of the finest examples of inter-divisional endeavor by the Library of Congress (including extensive research on place names, etc.; work by the Prints and Photographs Division was exemplary.
The images were scanned at 1,1100 ppi and are available for the entire collection for downloading. See: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/prokquery.html
LB