If, like me, you like taking pictures but blame the camera when they don’t turn out the way you hoped then you should be silently humbled by the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. I can’t afford a good camera. That’s my excuse for amatuerish pictures. I tried to learn about ISOs and shutter speed and manual focus and macro and wide-angle and although in theory I understand, in practice I just fail. Recently I have had use of an SLR camera with some ridiculously expensive lenses (each one the price of the car I can’t afford to buy). Here’s an example of what you can do. The wide angle lens:
View from Smerwick Harbour, Kerry
And using the zoom lens from exactly the same spot:
Detail of view across the bay
The technology is amazing. The camera is amazing. To take great pictures like this all you need is to be loaded. Back in the early 1900s you needed to be a bit of a genius.
The problem with photography as historical document is that the technology available at the time makes that period of time look – in retrospect – grainy, or blurry, or black and white. Imagine seeing World War 2 in high-definition. I mean the real war not the National Geographic reconstructions. Or the middle ages. Or the war of independence. Or Jesus Christ. Or the sixties. It would change our perspective of the time. Well, 100 years ago, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was taking colour pictures. And what’s most striking about his pictures from 1910 onwards is that the pictures look like they were taken today in Afganistan or Siberia or the Ural Mountains. They show us that not that much has changed in terms of how the world looks.
View of Tbilisi (early 1900s)
This is a picture of The Monastery of St. Nil on Stolobnyi Island in Lake Seliger in Tver Province taken in 1910.
The Monastery of St. Nil (1910)
It has been improved by digital technology but the original is also in colour. Here’s how he did it. He took three monochrome pictures of the same thing using three different filters. Like this:
Ostrechiny. Study. [Russian Empire
Under the correct light and projecting the three monochrome images it was possible to create a colour image that was very close to reality.
Ostrechiny. Study. Russian Empire
The pictures he took are amazing. His pioneering skill has made the past look modern and modern technology a little less awesome. His catalogue is available from the library of congress website if you can manage to navigate that randomly organised site.
The modern world being what it is he also has his own flikr account. Go look at some of his pictures there.
Weighing office (Chakva)
