A tsar's railcar darkroom colorized an empire before film could
Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky, 30 August 1863 to 27 September 1944, hauled three-plate color photography across Nicholas II's realms from about 1909 to 1915. Chemist-trained under Mendeleev, he left a Library of Congress trove that digital recombination after 2000 made startlingly vivid again.
The method was old; Prokudin-Gorsky made it work in the field. James Clerk Maxwell proposed in 1855 that colour could be captured as three black-and-white photographs taken through red, green and blue filters, then projected through matching filters and superimposed. Materials of the time were not good enough, and pioneers such as Louis Ducos du Hauron, Frederic Ives with his Kromskop viewers, and the photochemist Adolf Miethe spent decades improving results. Glass plates were used rather than film because they kept the three images from shifting out of register.
Prokudin-Gorsky, born to a noble military family on the Funikova Gora estate, studied chemistry under Dmitri Mendeleev in Saint Petersburg and music and painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts. After marrying Anna Lavrova in 1890 he ran her industrialist father's metal works until the revolution and lectured to Russia's oldest photographic society. He opened a studio in 1901 and in 1902 spent six weeks in Berlin learning colour sensitisation from Miethe; by 1906 he was president of the photographic section and editor of the leading photography journal.
His colour portrait of Leo Tolstoy, sold as postcards and prints, won him audiences with Grand Duke Michael and the Dowager Empress in 1908 and with Nicholas II's family in 1909. With the tsar's backing and a darkroom fitted in a railway car, he photographed the empire until about 1915. After the revolution he settled in Paris in 1922, where he opened a studio named after his youngest daughter, Elka, which his children later ran as Gorsky Frères. He died there in 1944, a month after the city's liberation. Most of his negatives reached the Library of Congress, which began digitising and combining them in 2000.
Source: Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
