The colour photography of Sergey Mikhailovich Prokudyn-Gorsky

Sergey Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a pioneer ofphotography in Russia and a pioneer of colour photography. Very little has been written about his life history. Like so many of the artists and architects of pre-revolutionary Russia, he has been forgotten, leaving a blank space in the history of photography that remains to this day. In this respect, Prokudin-Gorskysuffered the same fate as the recently rediscovered Russian realist painters.
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These were the Peredvizhniki, or "wanderers," the most significant Russian secessionist movement of the nineteenth century, who opposed the inflexible form and content of traditional Academy painting. Their pictures, particularly their painterly representations of landscapes and scenes from rural Russian life, were not dissimilar from the photographs taken by Prokudin-Gorsky.
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The period during which Prokudin-Gorsky worked - the late nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century—was a period of social, political, and technological upheavals. Some of these changes were slow to establish themselves, and their future consequences could therefore barely be guessed at; others, however, could not be ignored.
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The old Russia of Tolstoi and Chekhov was gradually passing away.

The religious and feudal structures that remained firmly embedded in Russian society until the end of the nineteenth century retarded industrialization and, as a consequence, the establishment and emancipation of a middle class and an industrial labour force. However, although industrialization got under way later in Russia than in other Western European nations, the social changes that it brought were equally unstoppable.

Representing an opposing and reactionary extreme, and seemingly blind to the changing times, the last tsar, Nicholas II (Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov), who came to power in 1894, espoused conservatism and continuity — a policy which he was to pursue, with few concessions until his abdication in the aftermath of the February Revolution of 1917.

Although the tsar suppressed nascent reform movements at the turn of the century, the first Russian revolution of 1905 forced him to moderate the autocratic political system by introducing basic rights, a constitution, and a parliament, the Duma, Nicholas Il also continued the foreign policy of his predecessors — the territorial expansion and consolidation of the Russian Empire. In the age of global imperialism, the tsar's realm had the largest continuous territory, in terms of surface area, of any state, extending from Finland to Turkestan and from Poland to Siberia.

Annexation attempts in the south and east were by no means peaceful, leading to a number of uprisings and wars, such as the Russo-Japanese War in the region of Korea, lasting from 1904-1905, and Russia's participation in the First World War from 1914-1917. Prokudin-Gorsky was a photographer who was given the task of capturing the old Russia in images, in the spirit and at the command of Nicholas II. Consciously or unconsciously, this made him a witness to change.

With his colour photographs, which, in their way, ushered in a new age in photography and the visual culture of the twentieth century, he created extensive documentation, a remembrance of a space and a time that were about to vanish forever.

‍Sergey Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was born in 1863 in Murom, part of the northerly province of Vladimir. His family were Saint Petersburg nobility. After attending school, he studied sciences in St. Petersburg, specializing in chemistry and studying under the internationallyfamous chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, whose periodic table of the chemical elements is still in use today.

In 1889, Prokudin-Gorsky left Russia for two years tolecture at Berlin's Technische Universität (Technical University) in the department of chemistry, photomechanics, and spectral analysis, and to devotehimself to the problem of colour reproduction in photography. After a further visit to Paris in order to continue his studies, Prokudin-Gorsky returned to Russia circa 1901.

Influenced by the growing importance, spread, and popularityof photography in Germany, France, and other Western European countries, Prokudin-Gorsky no longer saw his role as simply that of a physicist who was interested in photographic processes. He became an advocate for a medium that, at the time, was little-known in Russia.

Now a member of the Imperial Technical Society, he lectured on photography and on photomechanical and chemical processes as a new and important scientific tool. According to Prokudin-Gorsky, photography" would embrace all areas of science” and leave traditional recording techniques far behind." His students included doctors and biologists who used photography in their epidemiology and microbiology research. During this period, Prokudin-Gorsky also published a number of handbooks on photography, and, in 1906, became editor of the magazine Fotograf-Liubitel ("AmateurPhotographer"), one of the first Russian photography magazines.

Technological advances in photography — especially new printing techniques and the development of portable handheld cameras, which made photography simpler and relatively affordable — allowed more and more amateur and professional photographers to use photography for professional or private purposes, and for purposes of artistic expression. Circa 1904 (and driven not least by the desire to compete with Western Europe and the USA), Prokudin-Gorsky evolved the idea of systematically documenting the people, landscapes, monuments, and historical sites of Russia — in colour.

Over the years he worked on refining the photographic plate with the aim of developing a method for increasing the sensitivity of pan-chromatic emulsions (cyan, magenta, yellow) that would make it possible to project colour photographs. Prokudin-Gorsky presented his first experiments in this line of research in a series of lectures at the Imperial Technical Society and at the photographic societies of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, with the aim of garnering support for his project.

Financially independent due to his family connections and his marriage to Anna Aleksandrovna Lavrova, an industrialist's daughter, he was aware that realizing the project would require significant financial, technological, and logistical means, and would barely be possible without state recognition and support. The tsar's brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich Romanov, played a key role towards gaining this support. As chairman of the Saint Petersburg photographic society, he took considerable interest in photography and in technological innovations in the field, and it was he who put Prokudin-Gorsky in touch with the tsar and his entourage.

To demonstrate the nature of his project, Prokudin-Gorsky created a number of reproductions, including a portrait of the celebrated author Leo Tolstoy, which he presented as a projection to his audience at the Tsarskoye Selo, the court of the tsar. This was the first time that the tsar —and, indeed, the majority of those present — had seen projected colour photographs, and Prokudin-Gorsky deliberately presented this projection as a visual spectacle. Thanks to their aesthetic qualities, the colour photographs spoke for themselves.

That Prokudin-Gorsky gained the Tsar's support was also due to his idea of reproducing the pictures in large numbers and using them as projections in school lessons, particularly in history lessons. The idea was to use photographic images to promote learning. They were to be circulated as widely as possible, bearing witness to the natural beauty, grandeur, technological advancements, architecture, history, and cultural diversity of the Russian Empire.

Generous financial support, extended over several years, allowed Prokudin-Gorsky to import the necessary technical equipment from elsewhere in Western Europe, which included several plate cameras, projectors,and a large quantity of highly sensitive glass plates. In order to preserve the material and to be able to check the results on location, he had a mobile darkroom set up in a horse-drawn coach and in a train wagon — as was the standard practice for war photography.

His financial backing allowed for monthsof traversing what was, in some cases, largely impassable terrain, by ship, by in, and by other means of transport. He also received considerable help interms of logistical support: Prokudin-Gorsky was given letters of recommendation from the Ministry for Communication and Transport guaranteeing the cooperation of local officials and authorizing unrestricted access and freedom of movement within each province (the latter privilege was by no means an automatic right at the time). Prokudin-Gorsky had proven his ability to direct such a project involving great distances and a considerable timescale by the projects he had previously undertaken, such as his reports on the Russo-Japanese war, which had been commissioned by the Russian war office.

Conforming to the priorities imposed on the project byTsar Nicolas II, Prokudin-Gorsky embarked on his first journey in the summer months of 1909: a documentation of the course of the Marinsky canal, which linked the Volga and Neva rivers in the north to the Ural area in the south and ran through the heartland of the Russian Empire. A project initiated by Peter the Great (1672-1725) in the seventeenth century, the canal was Russia's most important waterway, linking villages and cities and enabling trade and industrial development.

To judge from the surviving glass plates, this first journey, which was divided into a northern and a southern leg and extended into the subsequent year, was Prokudin-Gorsky's most extensive documentation. It is therefore very revealing of the formal and aesthetic photographic principles that characterize the whole of Prokudin-Gorsky's work. The shots of expansive landscapes show an affinity for the photographic genre of pictorialism, which, in its turn, is based on the Romantic landscape paintings and literature of the nineteenth century — the idealised representation of nature and the simple rural life. It was a waterside landscape reflected in the water, fields, clouds, lonely woods, and villages.

The depiction of Russian Orthodox churches was a further significant motif: from humble wooden churches to huge, grand buildings whose imposing onion domes represented the typical architecture and traditional power of the Russian church. In pre-revolutionary Russia, the Church's power was not confined to the sphere of religious belief. It was a real political force, and a critical instrument of national cohesion. Like the photographs of historic sites, suchas the series of pictures featuring the historic battlefield of Borodino, the scene of a decisive battle between the Russian army and French troops under Napoleon, the photographs of churches and monasteries and their interiors symbolize the continuity maintained by the Russian Empire ever since the Middle Ages.

Another group of pictures documents the growth in industrial infrastructure — the precursors and signifiers of industrialization: steel and wooden bridges, steamships, dams, railways, temporary settlements. Many of these projects were still in progress or had only recently been completed. Set against the expansive immensity of the landscapes, these pieces of infrastructure often look very rudimentary and fragile, but they are nonetheless inscribed into the surface of the earth. Instead of human beings dominating nature, nature dominated human beings. However, the photographs should not be seen as a criticism — instead, they are an expression of the positivist faith in progress of the nineteenth and twentieth century, which envisaged expansion and technological development that would improve living conditions for the rural population. Access to remote areas and improved connections to cities signified urgently needed modernisation.

As the similarities in presentation and picture construction suggest, the chemist and photographer Prokudin-Gorsky saw no contradiction between depicting romanticized landscapes and documenting technological and scientific progress. He saw his role as that of a distanced, neutral observer. A sunset and a photograph of a waterworks might be equally poetic. There are no individual portraits of people — instead, people are shown performing everyday activities. Prokudin-Gorsky tried to recreate the immediacy of the life that he observed on his journey: his subjects were farmers, (mostly) women bringing in the harvest, woodsmen, schoolchildren, boatmen, and agricultural workers.

Yet the impression of spontaneity is artificial — these could not really be snapshots, due to the limitations of the photographic technology. Prokudin-Gorsky took his photographs with a handheld camera that was lighter and less bulky than the standard large-format plate cameras of the time, but the technique of exposing the different colour plates called for comparatively long exposure times, which meant that a tripod had to be used.

The hand camera that Prokudin-Gorsky used was designed by his former mentor, the German chemist Adolf Miethe, with whom he had worked on refining colour photography in Berlin. The camera was designed to allow the same subject to be photographed through the three different colour filters at one-second intervals. The 84 x 232 mm glass plates were moved into place automatically within the casing. This elaborate technique limited the capacity for photographing moving subjects.

In order to ensure ideal conditions for colour reproductions, Prokudin-Gorsky almost always took his photographs on sunny days, which meant that he had to remain at many locations for several days. Although the photographer's self-portraits show him working alone, and we have no reports about the actual conditions under which he worked, it is safe to assume that he was accompanied by several assistant photographers, or found helpers on location who could assist him in creating his photographs.

The public presentation of the photographs from the first Russia journey was a complete success. However, although special prism projectors created impressive colour photography projections, the planned reproduction of the coloured glass plates proved to be more complicated. Technically possible but requiring much more time and money than anticipated, the idea of reproducing the pictures in large numbers was consequently shelved. Prokudin-Gorsky's alternate plan to make a profit by turning the photographs into colour postcards fell through, due to high printing costs and the fact that they would have to be coloured by hand.

A few months after he returned to Saint Petersburg; Prokudin-Gorsky began planning further journeys which, in the years between 1910 and 1915 (with a number of interruptions), took him to Turkestan and Afghanistan, the Caucasus, the Central Asian provinces, and Siberia.

‍In the era of the Russian Empire (1721-1917), Russiagained gigantic swaths of new territory, especially in the south and east. Inthe early twentieth century, Russia's territory covered almost one-sixth of theEarth's land area. It extended from the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea in thewest to the Pacific Ocean in the east, a distance of almost 10,000 kilometers,and its territory was so extensive that it spanned eleven time zones. A censusheld in 1897 estimated the population of Russia at over 125 million — thehighest population in the world after China and the British Empire. 

The population of many of these regions was composed of a large and sometimes confusing number of ethnic groups. Some, like the Caucasus region and Turkistan, were fragmented into different administrative regions or were formerly part of the Ottoman Empire.

The former Turkestan, which incorporated territoriesincluding the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kirghizia, was annexed in 1864, whereupon it became a de facto colony under Russian military control and administration. As with the Caucasus and Siberia areas, the dispossession of the indigenous population was followed by the settlement of a large number of Russian farmers and officials in this newly captured territory. They dominated the extensive cotton cultivation and the textile industry,as well as the timber and metal industries, and coordinated internal and external exports. For instance, until the outbreak of the First Word War, the production of cotton — the principal export of Turkestan — was sufficient to cover 75 percent of Imperial Russia's needs.

For these areas, the price of modernization, whichbegan with the construction of railway lines such as the Trans-Siberian Railway(1891-1901) and the link between Samarkand and Tashkent (1888-1910), as well as the construction of large-scale irrigation systems, was social inequality and the loss of political, economic, and cultural self-determination. Certainly, modernization improved quality of life for some; for the majority of the indigenous population, however, Russian rule amounted to repression. Between 1910 and 1915, there were a number of instances of uprisings and of mass unrest that had had to be put down by the military. These were exacerbated by the increasingly bleak economic situation on the eve of the First World War.

Like Francis Frith's Egypt photographs, or Felice Beato's photographs of Japan in the late nineteenth century, the pictures that Prokudin-Gorsky took on his journeys through Siberia, the Caucasus, and Samarkand reveal little of the social and economic malaise of the time. From the photographs, one cannot tell whether the photographer was aware of what his work revealed or concealed. This neutrality in the photographer's gaze is primarily due to the fact that Prokudin-Gorsky had been commissioned to take these photographs. He was well aware that only apolitical representations could be shown or distributed publicly— especially in the context of school lessons or postcards.

He chose his subjects according to the received aesthetic documentation principles of Russia proper, with emphasis on the ethnic diversity of the new territories. Prokudin-Gorsky therefore photographed a large number of peasants and workers in their everyday clothing, or people in traditional dress clearly posing for the camera in an improvised studio setting.

This comparative view of people and their environments, of the different geographical conditions, vegetation, andarchitectonic peculiarities of different regions, manifests a certain exoticism, a quasi-anthropological interest in "the other." Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs allowed people to see places that many of them had never seen before — let alone had ever been able to travel to. In fact, ever since its invention, one of the most important functions of photography has been to make the world visually accessible. There has always been a drive to make the world available for consumption in pictures, as a mediated experience, or to make it available for scientific purposes. Prokudin-Gorsky’s work could be regarded as an example of early travel photography, satisfying — and also stimulating — the public's desire for views of distant, unknown places.

At the same time, the idea of a systematic, state-sponsored documentation has clear parallels with other large-scale photographic collections such as the Mission Héliographique in France, the Photographic Survey Movement in England, and similar projects in the USA. In particular, the photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, who were commissioned by the railway companies to document the opening up of the American West in the 1860s and 1860s, could be regarded as the Western equivalent of Prokudin-Gorsky’s portrait of the Russian Empire.

In this respect, photography and extensive photographic collections also functioned as an instrument of power, not merely documenting the existing social and political structures, but fixing them inpictures. Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs were an expression of imperial power, aconfirmation of its existence and a justification of its continued existence.

The outbreak of World War One in 1914 repeatedly interrupted Prokudin-Gorsky’s documentation project and forced him to reduce its scale, as he was required to take more photographs for the military. His official support ended in 1915, presumably due to political confusion at home and abroad and to the increasingly weakened state of the empire. Most of his work therefore dates from between 1909 and 1915, when he was photographing "interesting and significant subjects in natural colour" for the tsar. World War One triggered a massive economic decline, largely putting an end to foreign investment and to commissions from the textile, wood, and chemical industries. The bleakness of the economic outlook played a major role in the fall of the tsar in 1917.

‍After the Soviet revolutionary victory and thedeclaration of Vladimir Ilich Lenin as head of state, Prokudin-Gorsky, alongwith his wife and their three children, emigrated from Russia, joining theflight into exile of the Russian aristocracy and the higher echelons of themiddle class. Prokudin-Gorsky was aware of the value of his photographic workand took his collection of approximately 6,000 glass plates and a series ofphoto albums containing black-and-white photographs with him on his journeyinto exile. Initially, he travelled to Norway. After two years, however, hedecided that he had no future there, professionally or scientifically, andmovedwith his family to London and then to Paris. From 1920 to 1922, he gave anumber of lectures at the famous Royal Photographic Society in London, andpublished articles in the British Journal for Photography on the process of colourphotography and on its potential value for education. However, Prokudin-Gorskywas unable to repeat his former successes or to continue his career as ascientist, either in London or in Paris. The colour photography technique —andabove all, colour photograph distribution —was still extremely expensive, andthe technology was still flawed. Printing techniques also remained in theirinfancy, meaning that colour photography could be utilized and exploitedcommercially only on a small scale.

Unlike black-and-white photography, which saw large-scale use in the booming illustrated press and became well-established asa mass medium, colour photography was a luxury, albeit a luxury that was also a promising experiment.

Its high cost and limited use made state and private financial backers reluctant to invest in refining colour photography. As an émigré, Prokudin-Gorsky did not possess sufficient financial means to continuehis research or his production of documentary or artistic colour photographs. Instead, he ran a small commercial photography studio in Paris with his sons Dimitri and Mikhail until his death at the age of 81, shortly after theliberation of Paris in September 1944. It was his sons who donated what remained of the collection to the Photographic Collection of the Library ofCongress in Washington D.C. in 1948. The reason why Prokudin-Gorsky's work, and achievements, are seldom remembered lies partly in the abrupt ending of his career, the fact that the fall of the Russian Empire altered priorities, and that other pictorial languages such as that of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s have since arisen. Additionally, the limited possibilities for printing his photographs restricted their circulation and, as a consequence, their historical impact. Now, thanks to the restoration work and digitalisationof the collection by the Library of Congress, the work of Prokudin-Gorsky can be rediscovered.

Interestingly, the restoration team at the Library of Congress made a conscious decision not to erase the traces left by the passage of time by means of digital restoration, instead choosing to leave them visible. Because some of the colour plates were damaged or had cracks in their emulsion, "errors" were created during their exposure. These errors have the dual effect of making one aware of the way the photographs were produced and giving the images an abstract aesthetic.

‍What, from a contemporary perspective, is thesignificance of Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs?What makes these pictures so valuable to us today? Prokudin-Gorsky'sproject attests to the persistence of the impulse to capture the world inphotographic images. Whether in the nineteenth-century topologicaldocumentation projects mentioned here, in the Archives de la Planète, conceivedand financed by Albert Kahn, or in modern endeavours to document and measuretheglobe such as Google Earth — the impulse to photograph"everything," to preserve everything so that it can be catalogued,has surfaced time and again since the invention of photography (whether analogor digital).

Major technological innovations, such as the introduction of lightweight handheld cameras, the invention of the celluloid negative, colour photography, and digital photography all provide the motor for this impulse. What was really remarkable about Prokudin-Gorsky's achievement was primarily that he did not merely refine the technique of colour photography, which had been researched by a number of cooperating or competing scientists for decades, but that he took the decisive step of bringing it out of the laboratory and into the field. He proved that it was possible to put the complex colour photography process, with its associated logistical challenges, into practice in the open air and whilst traversing considerable distances.

His colour documentation of the Russian Empire allowed the contemporary public a view of the world that had not previously existed, while to the viewer of today, they offer startlingly immediate views of a place and a time previously known to them, if at all, only in black and white. With a few isolated exceptions, the part of our collective pictorial memory that is in colour stretches back only as far as the twentieth century. Yet the intervening time has robbed Prokudin-Gorsky's pictures of none of their power and quality as a spectacle. On the contrary, it is striking how impressive and valuable to us they have become, and this is ultimately because they break through the expectations created by the way we are used to seeing the past.

Nostalgia : the Russian empire of Czar Nicholas II / captured in color photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskiihttps://www.cca.qc.ca/fr/recherche/details/library/publication/861336009

Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Photographs-Tsar-Mikhailovich-Prokudin-Gorskii-Commissioned/dp/0803769962

Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/collections/prokudin-gorskii/
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