Russian Empire color pictures, taken during the 1910s (1909-1915), by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.
Library of the Congress
I love this series of photos and there are some here I hadn’t seen before, but that’s not surprising as there are over 3500 of them. Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii developed a technique of taking three black and white photographic plates simultaneously through three different colour filters that when projected together would be in excellent full colour:
Tsar Nicholas II commissioned him to tour the country recording the Russia of 1910, but until digital technology came along the process of putting the 3 images together was so difficult and costly very few were made and almost no-one saw them. That probably helped preserve the plates so amazingly that even though they are over 100 years ago they look like they could be National Geographic photos from 70 years later, and so clear they look like you’ve just stepped out of the door of a time machine.
