Sergey Prokudin Gorsky (early Russian color photography)

__html__Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944) was a Russian chemist who was an early innovator in color photography. He studied under Adolf Miethe (co-inventor of the camera flash) to learn the early arts of color photography. In 1908, he gained fame for making Russia's first color photographic portrait, of Leo Tolstoy. This and other photos gained the attention of Tsar Nicholas II, who gave Prokudin-Gorsky funding to spend several years documenting the Russian Empire, using a special darkroom installed inside a railroad car.Prokudin-Gorsky's methodology, based on Miethe's, involved exposing…__html__Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944) was a Russian chemist who was an early innovator in color photography. He studied under Adolf Miethe (co-inventor of the camera flash) to learn the early arts of color photography. In 1908, he gained fame for making Russia's first color photographic portrait, of Leo Tolstoy. This and other photos gained the attention of Tsar Nicholas II, who gave Prokudin-Gorsky funding to spend several years documenting the Russian Empire, using a special darkroom installed inside a railroad car.Prokudin-Gorsky's methodology, based on Miethe's, involved exposing three sheets of glass covered in a light-sensitive emulsion, each recording a red, green, or blue "channel" of light. Most of his negatives were seized by Soviet officials after the revolution or otherwise lost. After Prokudin-Gorsky's death in Paris in 1944, just over 1,900 fragile negatives remained; the U.S. Library of Congress purchased them from his heirs in 1948 for about $5,000.Assembling the negatives into prints was a delicate, complex, and time-consuming process — until digital technology made it much faster. In 2001, the Library of Congress put on an exhibit titled The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated, bringing many of his photos to light for the first time. They were something of a sensation, offering an eerily contemporary-seeming view into life on the Russian steppe a century earlier, a time we're used to seeing only in black and white.もっと見る