This Photograph Was Taken in 1911 and Nobody Could Print It Until 2004

🎨 Every other film on this channel is in black and white, because that is what survives. This one is in colour, and the colour is calculated. There are 840 photographs here, taken in the Russian Empire between about 1904 and 1915 by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, and he never saw a single one of them the way you are about to. The technology to print a colour photograph on paper did not exist yet. His camera exposed one long glass plate three times in quick succession, through a blue, a green and a red filter. Projected through three lenses onto one screen, the three greys became a colour photograph. ⏱️ The flaw could not be fixed, and it is visible throughout this film. The three exposures are seconds apart. Anything that moved does not line up: running water comes out as bands of red and green and blue, a branch in the wind splits into three ghosts, a person who walked away is gone from two thirds of the picture. That is why 220 of these 840 photographs are churches, monasteries and cathedrals. A cathedral will sit still for fifteen seconds. A crowd will not. 🚂 In 1909 Nicholas II gave him travel papers into restricted areas and a railway carriage fitted out as a darkroom. 163 of the photographs are from Central Asia, including the most famous image in the archive: Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara, photographed in 1911. What is missing is as consistent as what is there. No strike, no demonstration, no poverty presented as poverty, in a country four years from a revolution. He was photographing the empire for the empire, in the empire's carriage. 🤍 111 of these images have almost no colour at all. They are album pages of small sepia contact prints: the record of roughly 710 photographs whose glass negatives are simply gone. He left Russia in August 1918 and did not come back. He died in Paris in September 1944, a month after the city was liberated. In 1948 his sons sold what was left to the Library of Congress. The collection was scanned in 2000, and in 2004 software finally aligned all 1,902 triple negatives into the images you are watching. 📷 Every picture in this film is a real archive photograph. The colour has been assembled from the original three exposures and nothing has been added. 🗂️ All images are public domain, from the Library of Congress Prokudin-Gorskii collection via Wikimedia Commons. #history #colourphotography #russianempire #prokudingorsky #archivephotography