Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky (;  – September 27, 1944) was a Russian chemist and photographer. He is best known for his pioneering work in colour photography and his effort to document early 20th-century Russia.

Using a railway-car darkroom provided by Emperor Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorsky travelled the Russian Empire from around 1909 to 1915 using his three-image colour photography to record its many aspects. While some of his negatives were lost, the majority ended up in the US Library of Congress after his death. Starting in 2000, the negatives were digitised and the colour triples for each subject digitally combined to produce hundreds of high-quality colour images of Russia and its neighbours from over a century ago.

Biography

Early life

Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was born in the ancestral estate of Funikova Gora, in the Pokrovsky Uyezd of the Vladimir Governorate (now Kirzhachsky District, Vladimir Oblast). His parents were of the Russian nobility, and the family had a long military history. They moved to Saint Petersburg, where Prokudin-Gorsky enrolled in Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology to study chemistry under Dmitri Mendeleev. He also studied music and painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts.

Marriage and career in photography

In 1890, Prokudin-Gorsky married Anna Aleksandrovna Lavrova, and later the couple had two sons, Mikhail and Dmitri, and a daughter, Ekaterina. Anna was the daughter of the Russian industrialist Aleksandr Stepanovich Lavrov, an active member in the Imperial Russian Technical Society (IRTS).

thumb|upright|left|Prokudin-Gorsky in 1906

In 1901, Prokudin-Gorsky established a photographic studio and laboratory in Saint Petersburg. The following year, he travelled to Berlin and spent 6 weeks studying colour sensitization and three-colour photography with photochemistry professor Adolf Miethe, the most advanced practitioner in Germany at that time. Throughout the years, Prokudin-Gorsky's photographic work, publications and slide shows to other scientists and photographers in Russia, Germany and France earned him praise,

thumb|upright|[[Lithograph print of Leo Tolstoy in front of Prokudin-Gorsky's camera in Yasnaya Polyana, 1908]]

Perhaps Prokudin-Gorsky's best-known work during his lifetime was his color portrait of Leo Tolstoy, which was reproduced in various publications, on postcards, and as larger prints for framing. The fame from this photo and his earlier photos of Russia's nature and monuments earned him invitations to show his work to the Russian Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna in 1908, and to Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1909. In the course of ten years, he was to make a collection of 10,000 photos. Prokudin-Gorsky considered the project his life's work and continued his photographic journeys through Russia until after the October Revolution. He still pursued scientific work in color photography, published papers in English photography journals and, together with his colleague , obtained patents in Germany, England, France and Italy.

Early practitioners

Louis Ducos du Hauron conducted early experiments with the three-color principle in the late 1860s. During the period from the 1870s to the 1890s, he created several color prints and photographs.

In 1877, Edward Bierstadt showcased the first successful three-color prints in the United States. His work gained attention in the 1890s when he exhibited color prints of various subjects such as oil and watercolor paintings, floral studies, and portraits from life.

The first person to widely demonstrate good results by this method was Frederic E. Ives, whose "Kromskop" system of viewers, projectors and camera equipment was commercially available from 1897 until about 1907. Only the viewers and ready-made triple photographs for use in them sold in any significant quantity. Still life arrangements, unpopulated landscapes and oil paintings were the typical subject matter, but a few examples of color portraiture from life were also offered.

Another very notable practitioner was Adolf Miethe, with whom Prokudin-Gorsky studied in Germany in 1902.

In 1905, the Neue Photographische Gesellschaft established a color photography studio in Berlin. The studio utilized the three-color principle and employed a printing process developed by Robert Krayn. Some of the resulting images were published as postcards, featuring notable individuals including Kaiser Wilhelm II and Pope Pius X.

Equipment

thumb|Prokudin-Gorsky with his colour camera and an assistant

Photographic plates, which had the light-sensitive emulsion coated on a thin sheet of glass, were normally used instead of flexible film, both because a general transition from glass plates to plastic film was still in progress and because glass provided the best dimensional stability for three images intended to match up perfectly when they were later combined.

An ordinary camera could be used to take the three pictures, by reloading it and changing filters between exposures, but pioneering color photographers usually built or bought special cameras that made the procedure less awkward and time-consuming. One of the two main types used beam splitters to produce three separate images in the camera, making all three exposures at the same time and from the same viewpoint. Although a camera of this type was ideal in theory, such cameras were optically complicated and delicate, and liable to get out of adjustment. Some designs were also subject to optical phenomena that could cause noticeably uneven color or other defects in the results. The other, more robust type was an essentially ordinary camera with a special sliding holder for the plates and filters that allowed each in turn to be efficiently shifted into position for exposure—an operation sometimes partly or even entirely automated with a pneumatic mechanism or spring-powered motor.

Adolf Miethe designed a high-quality, sequential-exposure color camera, which was manufactured by Bermpohl and became available commercially in 1903. Prokudin-Gorsky published an illustration of it in Fotograf-Liubitel in 1906. The most common model used a single oblong plate 9 cm wide by 24 cm high, the same format as Prokudin-Gorsky's surviving negatives, and it photographed the images in unconventional blue-green-red sequence, which is also a characteristic of Prokudin-Gorsky's negatives if the usual upside-down image in a camera and gravity-compliant downward shiftings of his plates are assumed. An inventor as well as a photographer, Prokudin-Gorsky patented an optical system for cameras of the simultaneous-exposure type, and it is often claimed or implied that he invented, or at least built, the camera used for his Russian Empire project. No definite written or photographic documentation of his field equipment is known to exist, only the evidence inherent in the photographs themselves, and no rationale has been suggested for going to the trouble and expense of building a functionally identical copy of a Miethe-Bermpohl camera instead of simply buying one.

Miethe and Bermpohl also produced a matching three-color projector and a chromoscope. The Goerz optical company made a differently configured and more powerful three-color projector for Miethe. It, too, was commercially available.

Exposures

The required exposure time depended on the lighting conditions, the sensitivity of the photographic plate, and the camera lens aperture used. In a letter to Leo Tolstoy requesting a portrait sitting, Prokudin-Gorsky described the exposure as taking one to three seconds, but later, when recollecting his time with Tolstoy, he described a six-second exposure on a sunny day. Blaise Agüera y Arcas studied one landscape view, photographed in broad daylight but showing a clear, well-defined moon, and used the moon's movement to estimate that the whole procedure of three filtered exposures and two repositionings of the camera's plate holder had taken over a minute. The lens aperture Prokudin-Gorsky chose to use greatly affected the exposure time required. A small aperture is often used for landscape photography because it allows objects at various distances to all be sharply imaged at the same time, while the use of a large aperture is common for portraiture and plainly evident in the Tolstoy portrait. All other factors being equal, if for example a 16-second exposure was required when using a -inch-diameter aperture, an exposure of only 1 second would suffice with a 1-inch aperture.

Other processes

Prokudin-Gorsky was also acquainted with the use of Autochrome color plates, which did not require a special camera or projector. He was one of the favored few the Lumière Brothers introduced to their new product in 1906, the year before it went into commercial production. Autochrome plates were expensive and not sensitive enough for casual "snapshots" with a hand-held camera, but their use was simple and in expert hands they were capable of producing excellent results. They made color photography truly practical for advanced amateurs and led some pioneering users of color separation cameras to abandon their methods as outmoded, but Prokudin-Gorsky was not won over. No Autochromes by Prokudin-Gorsky are known to survive.

Although photographic color prints of the images were difficult to make at the time and slide show lectures consumed much of the time Prokudin-Gorsky used to demonstrate his work, photomechanical color prints of some were published in journals and books, and his studio issued some, most notably the Tolstoy portrait, as postcards and large photogravures.

Prokudin-Gorsky's own inventions, some of them collaborative, led to the granting of numerous patents, most issued during the years of his voluntary exile and not directly related to the body of work on which his fame now rests. Some concern processes for making subtractive color transparencies, which do not require any special projection or viewing equipment. Examples of these were preserved by Prokudin-Gorsky's family and have recently appeared online. Most of his patents relate to the production of natural-color motion pictures, a potentially lucrative application that attracted the attention of many inventors in the field of color photography during the 1910s and 1920s.

Documentary of the Russian Empire

Around 1905, Prokudin-Gorsky envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advances that had been made in color photography to document the Russian Empire systematically. Through such an ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical color projections" of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire.

Outfitted with a specially equipped railroad-car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire's bureaucracy, Prokudin-Gorsky documented the Russian Empire between around 1909 and 1915. He conducted many illustrated lectures of his work. His photographs offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming Russian Civil War. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population.

It has been estimated from Prokudin-Gorsky's personal inventory that before leaving Russia, he had about 3,500 negatives. and some he hid on his departure. Outside the Library of Congress collection, none has yet been found. The library counted 1,902 negatives and 710 album prints without corresponding negatives in the collection.

Digital color rendering

Rgb-compose-Alim Khan.jpg|Simple, unretouched color composite of Alim Khan, last Emir of Bukhara, 1911. At right, the original triple negative on glass, shown here in positive form. Prokudin-Gorsky photographed the upper, middle and lower images through blue, green and red filters.

Prokudin-Gorskii-19.jpg|"Digichromatography" version

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Due to the very specialized and labor-intensive processes required to make photographic color prints from the negatives, only about a hundred of the images were used in exhibits, books and scholarly articles during the half-century after the Library of Congress acquired them. in which the color images are combined yellow, magenta and cyan ink-on-paper halftones mass-produced with a multicolor printing press in the usual way.

It was only with the advent of digital image processing that multiple images could be quickly and easily combined into one. The Library of Congress undertook a project in 2000 to make digital scans of all the photographic material received from Prokudin-Gorsky's heirs and contracted with the photographer Walter Frankhauser to combine the monochrome negatives into color images. He created 122 color renderings using a method he called digichromatography and commented that each image took him around six to seven hours to align, clean and color-correct. In 2001, the Library of Congress produced an exhibition from these, The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated. The photographs have since been the subject of many other exhibitions in the area where Prokudin-Gorsky took his photos.

In 2004, the Library of Congress contracted with computer scientist Blaise Agüera y Arcas to produce an automated color composite of each of the 1,902 negatives from the high-resolution digital images of the glass-plate negatives. He applied algorithms to compensate for the differences between the exposures and prepared color composites of all the negatives in the collection. and they have become a favorite testbed for computer scientists.

Gallery

Some of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs, digitally processed, made available by the Library of Congress:

File:Sunni Muslim man wearing traditional dress and headgear.jpg|Dagestani Sunni Muslim, 1904

File:Group of workers harvesting tea Chakva Prokudin-Gorsky.jpg|Greek women and children harvesting tea in Chakvi, Georgia, circa 1905–1915

File:Jewish Children with their Teacher in Samarkand.jpg|Jewish children with their teacher in Samarkand, 1905–1915

File:Minister of Interior Bukhara.jpg|Kush-Beggi, Minister of the Interior of the Emirate of Bukhara, c. 1905–1915

File:Armenian woman in national costume (crop).jpg|Armenian woman in national costume near Artvin, c. 1905–1915

File:Prokudin-Gorskii-21.jpg|Zindan (prison) in Bukhara, 1907

File:Prokudin20923v Myatusovo1909.jpg|A chapel in Myatusovo, 1909

File:Prokudin 20893v Old Ladoga 1909.jpg|Staraya Ladoga Fortress, 1909

File:Russian peasant girls in front of a traditional wooden house in Kirillov.jpg|Russian peasant girls in a rural area along the Sheksna River near Kirillov, 1909

File:Staraya Ladoga Church.JPG|Church of St. John the Baptist on Malyshevaya Hill; Staraya Ladoga, 1909

File:Gorskii 04422u.jpg|Haymaking farm workers standing near their equipment, taking a break, 1909

File:Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii - City of Perm. General view (1910).jpg|General view of the city of Perm, 1910

File:Prokudin-Gorskii - Staro-Sibirskaia Gate in the city of Perm.jpg|Staro-Sibirskaia Gate in the city of Perm, 1910

File:Prokudin-Gorsky - Perm. Headquarters of the Ural Railway Administration.jpg|Headquarters of the Ural Railway Administration in the city of Perm, 1910

File:Perm. Mary Magdalene Church.png|Mary Magdalene Church in the city of Perm, 1910

File:Prokudin-Gorskii-25.jpg|Kama river near Perm, 1910. The bridge still stands today, but another similar bridge has been built alongside it.

File:Prokudin-Gorskii-09-edit2.jpg|Monastery of St. Nilus on Stolbny Island near Ostashkov, 1910

File:Gorskii 03966u.jpg|Pinchas Karlinskiy, supervisor of a floodgate at Chernigov, 1910

File:Prokudin-Gorskii-23.jpg|Bashkir switchman near Ust-Katav, 1910

File:Gorskii 04412u.jpg|Woman in traditional dress standing on rug in front of yurt, 1911

File:Prokudin-Gorskii-18.jpg|Nomadic Kyrgyz family on the Mirzachoʻl Steppe, 1911

File:Gorskii 20001u.jpg|Madrasah of Muhammad Amin Tupchiboshi (now demolished) in Bukhara, circa 1912

File:Prokudin-Gorskii-32.jpg|The Village of Kolchedan in Ural Mountains, 1912

File:Gorskii 04449u.jpg|View of Suzdal along the Kamenka River, 1912

File:Trinity Monastery in Tiumen (Prokudin-Gorskii).png|The mid-18th century Trinity Monastery in Tyumen, 1912

File:Prokudin-Gorskii-22.jpg|Austro-Hungarian POWs in Russian Karelia during World War I, 1915