The Russian Empire of Czar Nicholas II
They are a hundred years old. But they look as though they were shot just yesterday. Colour photos from the eve of the Russian Revolution give a fascinating pictorial account of the foundering Tsarist Empire.
Sometimes there are historical constellations that are quite unique in their own special way: Here is a country of immense size, pre-revolutionary Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. A land immensely rich in cultural and natural diversity. A land experiencing an economic boom, reignited thanks to the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
There is a Tsar who did not want to be Tsar, Nicholas II. An absolute but weak ruler who is incapable of introducing new reforms, of easing the political, social and economic tensions in his kingdom, of addressing the growing discontent amongst farmers and workers. He is the last Tsar of a declining era.
There is a technology that preoccupies researchers the world over that will change the image of the world forever: colour photography, just sufficiently advanced for larger scale use.
And finally, there is a man who had a great idea and the energy to bring it to fruition. A man who didn’t just take photos once or twice, but around 3,500 times (or more precisely over ten thousand times, but more about that later). His name: Sergei Michailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.
Adding even more magic to the Gesamtkunstwerk is the fact the US Congress Library acquired his photos decades later, a team of dedicated academics digitally prepared them and posted them on the internet for public use: a time machine that transports us back one hundred years to the middle of the most dramatic time in Russian history, it is a map in colour that we could only imagine in black and white; an unprecedented work in the history of photography.
Sometimes there are chances you only get once in life. And the photographer Sergei Michailovich Prokudin-Gorskii gets his on May 3rd, 1909. It is a Sunday. On this particular day, Tsar Nicholas II invites him to his St. Petersburg residence, Tsarskoye Selo, to a very special slide evening. The Tsar is keen to see this new photography in colour.
The photographer knows that on this particular evening his project “to photograph all of Russia in natural colour” could get the final nod. He chooses his photos carefully – sunsets, snowy landscapes, flowers, farm children, autumn scenes. And he arranges them cleverly – keeping the best and most effective pictures for an impressive finale. “But even after the very first photo,” he later reports, “when I heard the approving whispers of the Tsar, I was certain I would be successful.” Everything runs according to plan. The Tsar is visibly excited by the presentation. When the photographer finally asks if he would like to see “the real Russia” from time to time, the monarch promises him his wholehearted backing.
Prokudin-Gorskii gets his own train carriage with a darkroom, a boat for his river journeys and a specially adapted Model T Ford for the rough road in the Urals. But more important still are two documents signed by the Tsar himself. One gives him access to every region in the country - not something to be taken for granted in Russia those days. And a second, demanding that local administrators give him their full support. Prokudin-Gorskii sets out in June and heads north to take photos. In August he travels to the Ural Mountains.
Flashback: Sergei Michailovich Prokudin-Gorskii is born on 31 August 1863 presumably in Funikova Gora east of Moscow as the son of a noble family. The first years of the eventual master photographer are difficult to trace due to a lack of reliable sources. In any case, he receives a good education at the elite Lyceum Alexander School at the University of St. Petersburg. Chemistry is one of his subjects (as well as violin and painting, the young man seems to have many interests) and it is there that he meets Dmitri Mendeleev – the creator of the periodic table of elements and cofounder of the Russian Photographic Society in St. Petersburg. It might have been this meeting that first fired his interest.
In 1890 he marries Anna Alexandra Lavrova, daughter of an important St. Petersburg steel industrialist who also gives him a seat on the executive board of the company. He finds himself in a financially secure situation with his wife and three children, so at the latest in the mid-1890s he turns his focus to his photography. He becomes a member of the Russian Technical Institute, he publishes works, holds lectures on the progress of photography, takes part in exhibitions with black and white photos, visits conventions throughout Europe and opens his own studio in St. Petersburg in 1901.
A year later, Prokudin-Gorskii travels to Charlottenburg in Germany where he meets one of the most distinguished proponents of photography: Adolf Miethe, who has just invented a photo apparatus – the three-colour camera. The interchangeable camera captures three black and white negatives in quick succession, allowing them to later be recombined with red, green or blue filters. To see these images in full colour, the three separate photos are made into a slide transparency and projected with filtered lamps. It sounds less complicated than it actually is – all technical and historical details about this from page 136.
This camera will accompany Prokudin-Gorskii for the rest of his life: It is unclear to what extent he further developed the machine. In articles of the British Journal of Photography he talks of his own camera design and the special sensitising of the plates. “But there is no proof of this because neither the original nor sketches and replicas of the original exist,” says Jan Hubička, Museum of Photography Director at “Sechtl & Voseček” at Tábor in the Czech Republic, which hosted the first Prokudin-Gorskii exhibition in Europe in 2006. “Amongst photographers at this time it was quite common to spread rumours about their own designs. I know this from my own family.”
What is certain, however, is that “Prokudin-Gorskii displayed an incredible talent in working with the Miethe camera,” says Helena Zinkham, Department Head for Prints and Photography in the US Congress Library, “and that he had a truly visionary project in mind.” In 1905 he heads south and brings home images of the Caucasus Mountains. The following year he travels throughout Europe, to Italy, Germany, France. He visits the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, in Lyon, who are working on a completely new technique: the so-called autochrome plate, the first colour images taken with just one photo. Still, Prokudin-Gorskii remains true to the Miethe model. In 1908 he shoots one of his most famous and widely published photos: He portrays the writer Leo Tolstoy at his country estate in Yasnaya Polyana.
By the time Prokudin-Gorskii visits the Tsar in 1909 to present his big project, he has already made a name for himself. Prokudin-Gorskii is possibly driven by very different motives. He explained once that he is fascinated by colour photography not only because he captures contour but also the content of the object. He is patriotic and eager the show the beauty of their country to the children of Russia. And finally he is a businessman. “He thought he could establish a new market for photography in Russia and sell thousands of his slides,” explains Wassili Drutschin, teacher in Moscow and head of the extensive Prokudin-Gorskii research project. But the idea was destined to founder, not least because the projectors needed for use at home or in schools were much too expensive.
In the following years, Prokudin-Gorskii took thousands of photos. In 1913, according to his notations, he had already shot 3,350 glass negatives – images of an empire that covers a sixth of the Earth’s continents stretching from the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, and where, according to the 1897 national census, 125 million people live.
The photographer to the last Tsar visits the Volga region and the industrial areas of the Urals. He photographs the Mariinsk canal system and the Murmansk Railway in the north, plus many monasteries, churches and cultural monuments around Moscow as well as the Trans-Siberian Railway. He travels throughout the Caucasus and to Central Asia – regions that were only integrated into Russia’s tsarist empire in the mid-19th century during the last phase of the Russian conquest.
With his photographs, Prokudin-Gorskii pursues a documentary rather than an artistic goal. “Photography”, he writes to the ‘photographic impressionists’ in an article to the Fotograf Lubitel magazine for which we worked as an editor from 1906, “must be the art of chronicling more than anything else.”
And he chronicles a selected overall picture of the country. An overview that should please his mentor and sponsor, the Tsar, to whom he presents his new photos three times.
“A portrayal of the country,” as expert Wassili Drutschin says, “depicted with love,” – farmer’s children in their Sunday dress with a plate of summer berries in their hands; exotic nobility in full robes; proud highlanders of Dagestan always with one hand on the knife.
The carefully-composed nature of the photos is of course determined by the technique that requires a dignified, statue-like stance: Even in a good light, the subjects must hold still for a good ten, fifteen seconds until the three photos are taken. Should they not manage this – often unavoidable with large group shots – one can see the movement in the different colour contours of the photo.
What is not noticeable on the photos are the social and economic problems of the country: The poverty amongst farmers, which has increasingly worsened due to the abolition of serfdom for peasants in 1861. The misery of industrial workers whose numbers are climbing rapidly. The institutional anti-Semitism in the country. The ‘Russification’ – implemented in a variety of ways – of newly-conquered areas in the south. “Bloody Sunday” on 9 January 1905 when the Tsar’s troupes randomly shot down peaceful demonstrators, sparking the first revolution and the first half-hearted concessions from the Tsar. And setting in motion the creation of a parliament – the Duma – albeit with limited rights.
There are neither pro nor counter revolutionary statements known to have come from Prokudin-Gorskii. Politically he seems to be a blank sheet of paper throughout the 1917 revolution and beyond: in 1918 the new governments asks him to work for them.
Still, in that same year Prokudin-Gorskii leaves Russia never to return again. He first makes his way to Norway, later to England and finally to France. He leaves his family behind – more or less without a word. In 1920 he marries his assistant Maria Schedrimo. His first wife immigrates to France with her three grown-up children in 1923. “Without any help from my grandfather,” recounts grandson Dimiti Swetschine, a three-year-old when they moved. He himself has no real recollection of his grandfather, “and my grandmother and mother didn’t talk about him much because they didn’t have very nice things to say about him - understandably. Aside from his artistic and technical talent he was a very egocentric and aloof man.”
Nevertheless, there seemed to be no hard feelings left in the family. In 1925, Prokudin-Gorskii opens the photo lab “Elka” with his two sons from his first marriage, Dimitri and Michael. He dies in Paris in 1944.
Almost 2,000 photos are shipped from the old home to the new one – a time capsule that is unparalleled in its size and quality. What characterises Prokudin-Gorskii’s work are the conceptual design and the execution of the entire work, the unusual vibrancy of the photos. “Capturing such colours is something many photographers dreamt about those days,” says Lynn Brooks, the head of the Scan Centre in the US Congress who significantly expedited the digitisation and publication of the photos.
How the photos actually came to be in the Library of the US Congress is basically a story in itself. Here’s the short version: In 1948 Prokudin-Gorskii’s family sold the complete collection of exactly 1,902 glass negatives and 14 albums with black and white photo prints to the US Congress – for a price of 3,500 to 5,000 USD (the sources in this case are not totally clear). “We didn’t have it easy in France,” says Dimitri Swetschine, “but we had enough to live on. We sold the collection not because of the money, but primarily because we didn’t have the means to keep the glass negatives properly stored and preserved.”
In the year 2000, all of the glass negatives were scanned in high resolution and digitally processed, 122 of them underwent digital alterations. This was not to manipulate the original, to improve or correct it. It was to make their inner qualities more visible.
The challenge was the precise “registration”, the precise orientation of one photo to the other, in order to balance out the minimal movements caused by the motif or the interchangeable camera while taking the three photos. It proved to be a laborious process which was performed by Congress-commissioned photographer Walter Frankhauser using painstaking handiwork with Photoshop standard software. When he started, explained Frankhauser after finishing the job, he would spend 24 hours on one photo. Towards the end it was always six, seven hours per picture. From 2004, a new image processing software developed by the American specialist Blaise Aguera y Arcas helped make the preparation process to a great extent automatic.
All up, Prokudin-Gorskii had taken around 3,500 photos – almost half of them seem to be lost. “We’ve always held out hope,” says Lynn Brooks, “that perhaps new images would come to light as part of exhibitions. But sadly it hasn’t happened yet.”
So for the time being the question remains unanswered whether Prokudin-Gorskii ever photographed Tsar Nicholas II. Perhaps clues of this could be in photos of the Imperial villa in Denmark from October 1908. “I find it hard to imagine,” wonders the Moscow expert Wassili Drutschin, “that he travelled there just to photograph trees and flowers.”
The Time Machine
Colours of Time
The evolution of colour photography ran on parallel tracks from the mid-19th century: On the one hand the focus was on developing cameras and projectors, and on the other on improving photographic material.
The world’s first colour photos were presented by the English physician James Clerk Maxwell in 1861 in London. There was nothing truly exciting about Thomas Sutton’s subject, – a tartan medal ribbon - the colours only vaguely resembling the actual object. Maxwell was not a photographer, his primary intention was to demonstrate the basics of colour vision: He projected three black and white slides onto a screen each equipped with the corresponding red, green or blue colour filter used to take the image. This confirmed the principles of additive three-colour theory that had been introduced only a few years earlier: All colours can be created by mixing the three primary colours, red, green and blue.
Subsequently, the ‘Maxwellian’ experiment raised several other questions: The commonplace collodion wet plates, which in this case were used as the photographic medium, were more or less “colour blind” and only sensitive to blue and ultra-violet light. Hence, photos taken using the red and green filters would not have produced an image. It was only thanks to the extremely long exposure times of twenty minutes that the last shades of the blue and ultraviolet were able to pass through these filters.
In any case, the groundwork for the development of colour photography had been laid. And the photos that Prokudin-Gorskii shot fifty years later basically follow Maxwell’s arrangement, albeit in a more refined way.
Richard Leach Maddox brought photography a great step forward in 1871 when he developed the gelatine glass plate. The previously used wet plates required a huge effort from photographers: Each individual glass plate had to be processed immediately before and after each exposure. Only with the introduction of the dry plate did pre-produced and storable processing material become available – only the dry plate made it possible for photographers to travel with a reasonable amount of effort and without the need for a darkroom.
Two years later, the German chemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel discovered how to make the collodian emulsion sensitive to green light through adding a small amount of aniline-based dyes. In 1902, Adolf Miethe and his assistant Arthur Traube finally managed to also sensitise the plates to the long-wave orange/red range. With the first panchromatic plate, he created the foundations for using the entire range of visible light in the relevant tones of grey or greyscale. A milestone was established: For the first time authentic colour photos could be taken. The improvement of the emulsions, however, remained a major issue over the following years – especially with the aim of shortening the exposure time.
Still in 1902, Miethe was also the man who defined the state of technology with his three-colour camera, a camera in which Prokudin-Gorskii put his faith on his travels. Previously, pioneers like the Frenchman Louis Ducos du Hauron or American Frederick Eugene Ives had already pushed ahead with the development of camera and projection equipment. In 1878, Du Hauron produced the first colour paper print. It was an image of the city of Agen, prepared using a highly complex pigment print. On the eve of the 20th century, Ives himself marketed the first cameras and projectors for three-colour photography. In contrast to Miethe’s apparatus, the three partial pictures were made with the help of a system of prisms and mirrors; you only had to press the button once. These beam splitter cameras were clever designs in themselves, but required relatively long exposure times.
As early as 1907, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière introduced a completely new technology in Paris: The first commercially successful technology to take a colour photo with just one single shot. The panchromatic plate was coated with dyed grains of potato starch. One disadvantage compared to three-colour photography: “This mosaic screen plate process could lead to an unwanted clumping effect. Then, for example, it’d result in a green nose,” explains Gert Koshofer, Photographic Historian at the German Photographic Association. So it would have been for quality reasons that Prokudin-Gorskii stuck with the Miethe camera and with the autochrome plates he knew so well.
Finally, in 1936, Agfacolor and Kodachrome launch the first modern colour slide films onto the market – they were standard for decades, and were only replaced by digital photography.
Translated from German by Kaye Mueller for Terra Mater magazine, 2012
Photo: Alim Khan (1880-1944), Emir of Bukhara, taken in 1911, taken by Prokudin-Gorskii
Photo credit: Library of Congress
Terra Mater Magazine awarded with prestigious German Lead Award
On September 13, 2013, Terra Mater, the nature and science magazine from Red Bull Media House Publishing GmbH, was awarded with the renowned Lead Award in the category of Reportage Photography of the Year.
The honor recognised the magazine for historic photography featured in what was only its second issue (September 2012): Entitled “The Russian Empire of Czar Nicholas II,” the piece presented the work of Sergei Michailowitsch Prokudin-Gorskij, a pioneer of color photography whose vivid – but all-too-seldom seen – images documenting the last years of the czarist empire achieved a quality and realism that looks remarkably contemporary today.
Distributed bi-monthly and dedicated to taking readers on journeys that are both inspiring and educational, Terra Mater consistently pursues new, innovative ways to share reportage. The Lead Awards are Germany’s leading awards for print and online media, and Red Bull Media House editors gratefully acknowledged the honor as motivation to continue raising the bar in the production of premium magazines, online publications and apps.
For more information about the magazine and its content, have a glimpse at the website of Terra Mater Magazine.
