The spectacular photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who captured pre-Revolutionary Russia: "Color photographs from the Russian Empire (1909-1915)"
Categories: International, Cultures, news, Travel, Photography, Art, History
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The photographer, Prokudin-Gorskii. Study near the Kivach waterfall. [Suna River]
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Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a color photographer before his time, who undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire for Tsar Nicholas II. He was able to capture color by taking three pictures of each scene, each with a different red, green or blue color filter. Walter Frankhauser, a photographer contracted by the Library of Congress, manually registered and cleaned up some 120 of the original high-resolution scans, with breathtakingly beautiful results. The results of his effort can be seen at the online-exhibit The Empire That Was Russia.
Color photographs from the Russian Empire taken a century ago (1909-1915) HERE
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It's not surprising that this image is from a royal garden of some sort; araucaria (the pipe-cleaner-looking trees) are native only to South America and Australasia. Paul Gavrilovic has more and better information: "[Dagomys is] a resort town on the black sea in Georgia, known today as Sochi. A popular resort in imperial times as well as for Soviet citizens. The climate is subtropical, kind of like the coast of the Carolinas in the U.S. Which explains the Araucaria trees. The garden, although here royal conservatory, is typical of the area--palm trees and other tropical plants are found throughout the towns on the Black Sea, from Odessa to Yalta (Crimea) to Sukhumi and Gagry (Georgia). In fact, the Krasnodar region, just north of the Caucasus, as well as Georgia, are tea-growing areas, which shows how mild the climate there is."
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And Newsweek offers some incredible shots on their site, please check them out here: Prokudin-Gorskii Newsweek
Leo Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana, 1908, the first color photo portrait in Russia
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The Monastery of St. Nil on Stolobnyi Island in Lake Seliger in Tver Province. 1910
Full caption from The Library of Congress exhibition "The Empire That Was Russia:
View of the Nilova Monastery. The Monastery of St. Nil' on Stolobnyi Island in Lake Seliger in Tver' Province, northwest of Moscow, illustrates the fate of church institutions during the course of Russian history. St. Nil (d. 1554) established a small monastic settlement on the island around 1528. In the early 1600s his disciples built what was to become one of the largest, wealthiest, monasteries in the Russian Empire. The monastery was closed by the Soviet regime in 1927, and the structure was used for various secular purposes, including a concentration camp and orphanage. In 1990 the property was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church and is now a functioning monastic community once more
Larger version HERE
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