Jim Regan -- Site Reviews
The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated
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The online version of the exhibition is relatively small when compared to some sites reviewed here, and the presentation basic, but the images and their history are enough to hold a viewer's interest without any further enticement. From the historical perspective, the Prokudin-Gorskii images represent a photographic survey of the Russian Empire just prior to the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
They include architecture and landscapes, industry, citizens of the empire, and such subjects as a collection of POWs from the 1915 war with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. To capture these images in color, without the luxury of color film, the photographer would record three almost simultaneous black and white exposures on glass plate negatives, through red, green and blue filters – and later, project the images through the same filters, to present early color slide shows.
The effect of this method (nicely demonstrated in first photograph presented on the home page) is one of the most appealing aspects of the collection – the not-quite-accurate color renditions familiar to anyone who has seen hand-painted photographs or very early Kodachrome slides.
Beyond the home page, the site offers a biography of Prokudin-Gorskii, an explanation of this very early color process, and the images themselves, divided into Architecture, Ethnic Diversity, Transportation and People at Work. Each image is accompanied by a few lines of background information, and is linked to a full-screen version of the photograph.
Again, the effect of color in the pictures is significant. Its presence makes the subject matter of the images more immediate and tangible than most black and white pictures from the same period, while the slightly artificial look of the color clearly marks them as period photographs. (In some cases, the three-negative method actually enhances the image, as with the image of a floodgate supervisor. Since the river behind the subject couldn't keep perfectly still for three exposures, the ripples on the water's surface are recorded as a subtle rainbow of colors.)
This is an absorbing collection – as a historical record for some, and for the rest of us, as an assortment of curiosities (windmills on the Siberian plains) and aesthetic beauty (the village of Kolchedan). And, as with all good photography, the Prokudin-Gorskii images might even inspire some slight improvement in our own artistic endeavours – even those of us using auto-focus, auto-exposure, auto-wind cameras.
The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated can be found at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/.