Pre-revolutionary Russia in color photographs by Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky. Color photographs of Tsarist Russia by Prokudin-Gorsky

12 myths about Prokudin-Gorsky

Relatively recently, the pioneer of Russian color photography, Sergey Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944), “discovered” by the Internet, has already managed to turn into a real celebrity. His creative legacy leaves almost no one indifferent. As befits a real celebrity, the life and work of our hero has already acquired myths that are replicated daily on the Web (and not only) on a massive scale.

Fighting myths is completely hopeless, that's why they are myths.

However, serious admirers of the “master of natural color” may be interested in testing their knowledge.

I would appreciate any feedback, comments and questions!

1. Prokudin-Gorsky was born in Murom/St. Petersburg/Vladimir.

The first myth, or rather confusion, concerns the place of birth. Usually they write that Prokudin-Gorsky was born in Murom / St. Petersburg / Vladimir.

All three of the above places of birth, periodically named on different sites and in printed articles, are incorrect.

In 2010, it was documented (by an archival extract from the metric) that Prokudin-Gorsky was born in the family estate of Funikov Gora, Pokrovsky district, Vladimir province (now it is Kirzhachsky district)

The source of the myth about the birth of Prokudin-Gorsky in Murom is his own notes in the questionnaires, starting in 1918. Why he indicated the wrong place of birth is still not known.

With Murom, Sergei Mikhailovich had adolescence.

2. Study of Prokudin-Gorsky.

Until 2010, there was no documentary evidence of the education of Sergei Mikhailovich, hence the myth was born that he graduated in 1889 from the Polytechnic Institute in St. Petersburg .

In fact, from October 1886 to November 1888, Prokudin-Gorsky listened to lectures on the natural section at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University. Then, for some unknown reason, he left the university and in September 1888 became a student at the Imperial Military Medical Academy, which he also did not graduate for some reason.

The next myth is that after graduating from the supposedly Technological Institute, Prokudin-Gorsky went abroad, where for some time he taught chemistry at the Higher Technical School in Charlottenburg, lectured on spectral analysis and photochemistry, made contact with Adolf Mithe, then moved to Paris and continued his studies in the laboratory of the famous chemist Edme Jules Momenet, who was engaged in research in the field of color photography.

In fact, Prokudin-Gorsky did not go to any foreign country after completing (i.e. leaving) his studies, and in 1890 he got married and entered the service in the Demidov House of Charity for Workers (a charitable semi-state institution). He obviously could not know Edme Jules Momenet, since he died before Prokudin-Gorsky became interested in color photography, and met Adolf Mite only 12 years later, in 1902.

3. Prokudin-Gorsky invented color photography.

This is one of the main myths and, frankly, I don’t even want to refute it. But, as they say, "truth is more precious." The invention of color photography is a decades-long process in which many scientists have been involved. The largest contribution was made by the British scientist Clark Maxwell, who in 1855 proposed the principle itself, and in 1861 (2 years before the birth of Prokudin-Gorsky!) made the first experimental color photograph. Then there were the discoveries of the German scientist Wilhelm Vogel in the field of sensitization. Practically applicable technology of filming by the method of color separation in 1885 was created and began to be used by the American inventor Frederick Eugene Ives. In Europe, the same technology was created in 1901 by the German scientist Adolf Mite, from whom Prokudin-Gorsky studied.

Although all the equipment was ordered in Germany, Sergei Mikhailovich, being a talented photochemist, made a great contribution to improving the formulation of sensitizers.

4. Prokudin-Gorsky filmed the Russo-Japanese War.

Indeed, there is an album of photographs of this war, released in 1906, where the name of Prokudin-Gorsky is indicated on the title. However, this surname does not mean the authorship of the pictures, but the fact that Prokudin-Gorsky was the compiler and publisher of the album.

It has been documented that during the events captured in the photographs of the album, Sergei Mikhailovich was in St. Petersburg.

5. Prokudin-Gorsky - "royal photographer" / "personal photographer of the king" / "court photographer".

One of the most common myths or cliches.

In reality, Sergei Mikhailovich was never a court photographer. He met the tsar several times in his life (in 1909-1913), showed him his photographs and received support for a project to document the Russian Empire. By the time of the first meeting with the Tsar, Prokudin-Gorsky had already managed to make several photo expeditions and his collection was already called “famous” in the press. If it weren’t for the “royal” carriage and the steamboat, Prokudin-Gorsky would probably never have photographed the Chusovaya River and the village of Nyrob, but perhaps there would have been more pictures of the cities of central Russia.

6. The photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky are staged and varnish the reality of Tsarist Russia.

This myth is directly related to the myth of the "royal photographer".

Part of the truth, however, is present here. Firstly, Prokudin-Gorsky himself once wrote in his journal that the peasants tried to dress up better to shoot with him. Therefore, the clothes of people posing in the pictures are not always casual.

Secondly, the tsar's support for photographic expeditions still imposed some moral restrictions. Prokudin-Gorsky does not know of shots with emaciated people in starving villages, impoverished vagrants, scenes of a drunken fight at a rooming house, which can be found in abundance, for example, in Maxim Dmitriev.

But it seems that the point here is not even self-censorship and the desire to please those in power, but Sergey Mikhailovich's sincere desire to capture his country in its best manifestations, to create a bright image of the Fatherland for the patriotic education of young people on this material. He left it to others to reveal the social ulcers of Russian society.

In this sense, the photographic portrait of Russia he created on the eve of the revolution can be called quite truthful and realistic, although far from complete.

7. Prokudin-Gorsky could not print his pictures, but only design them.

In fact, Prokudin-Gorsky just became interested in color photography after he became a specialist in color printing (known since the 18th century).

He published his earliest photographs in the form of photo postcards in 1906, as well as inserts in the magazine "Amateur Photographer" in 1906-1909. Many of Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs have been published as book illustrations, some of which are of almost modern quality. For example, in the book by P. G. Vasenko “Boyars Romanovs and the accession of Mikhail Feodorovich” (St. Petersburg, 1913).

8. Prokudin-Gorsky did not shoot large cities: St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv.

Due to the fact that a significant part of the Prokudin-Gorsky collection is not known to us even by the names of the photographs, it is generally difficult to say that he did not photograph this or that city.

But St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, Sergey Mikhailovich definitely took pictures, just almost all of these pictures belong to the missing parts of the collection. At least 15 photographs of St. Petersburg are known, most of which are only by name. There were already 38 photographs of Kyiv taken in 1905, but only one of them has come down to us as a postcard reproduction. So far, only one view of Moscow is known (the Novospassky Monastery), but there could well be more of them.

9. Prokudin-Gorsky turned out to be completely unnecessary to the Soviet government.

The work of Prokudin-Gorsky for many people personifies the power and beauty of pre-revolutionary Russia, the whole world that was destroyed, buried by the revolution. Therefore, for many people it seems completely natural that there simply could not be a place for a “personal tsarist photographer” under the new regime, he turned out to be unnecessary, rejected and miraculously took his feet from Soviet Russia.

However, historical reality is much more complex and contradictory. Everyone knows that the “rejected” photographer arranged personal showings of his photographs in the Winter Palace in March 1918, but few people know that introductory remarks Lunacharsky, People's Commissar for Education, who turned out to be a great connoisseur and connoisseur of color photography, spoke before the show.

Also, many people know that Prokudin-Gorsky joined the organizing committee of the Higher Institute of Photography and Phototechnics being established in Petrograd in the same 1918, but almost no one knows that in May 1918 V.I. Lenin personally instructed to include Prokudin-Gorsky in composition of the Board of the Expedition for the Procurement of Government Papers. The workshop of Prokudin-Gorsky on B. Podyacheskaya received orders in 1918 from the Kommunist publishing house.

The largest specialist in color printing in Russia was urgently needed by the new authorities! Another question is whether Prokudin-Gorsky himself wanted to work under the new regime?

In August 1918, he went on another foreign business trip on behalf of the People's Commissariat of Education and never returned from it.

According to family tradition, in the early 1930s, Soviet representatives approached Sergei Mikhailovich with a proposal to return to the USSR to continue his scientific work, but the old master refused.

10. Prokudin-Gorsky emigrated, taking with him a suitcase / 20 boxes / wagon of photographic plates. At the same time, the photographs were confiscated at customs. royal family and photographs of a strategic nature.

In fact, as mentioned above, Prokudin-Gorsky left in August 1918 on a business trip on the instructions of the People's Commissariat for Education, from which he decided not to return. He received his collection (more precisely, part of it) from the USSR only a few years later (apparently, in the fall of 1931). By this point, the collection had obviously been owned for a long time. Soviet state. Therefore, some of the photographs were "excluded" (according to Prokudin-Gorsky himself), and not "confiscated at customs." Under what conditions did the Soviet government agree to send the bulk of the collection to France? the greatest mystery. Long-term research of the archives did not find any traces of the “export case”. As for the photographs of the royal family, the information about their existence is based on family legends and has not yet been documented.

11. In Soviet time the name of Prokudin-Gorsky was completely crossed out and forgotten.

This is wrong. Even during the Stalin period, there was no ban on his name and it was periodically mentioned in technical literature in connection with the history of the invention of color photography and color cinema. In 1955, S. Morozov's book "Russian Art Photography" was published, where all the merits of Prokudin-Gorsky were listed in the most laudatory tone (this book was later republished).

In 1970, the popular journal Science and Life published an article by S. Garanina “L. N. Tolstoy on a color photo. From that moment on, articles about Prokudin-Gorsky in the USSR were published periodically. In 1978, one of his most famous photographs (a portrait of Leo Tolstoy) was published on the cover of Ogonyok magazine with a circulation of more than 2 million copies; there was a small article about Prokudin-Gorsky himself in the same issue.

12. The images of Prokudin-Gorsky available on the Web are the result of complex computer technologies for color restoration.

In its most radical form, this myth sounds like " modern science I learned how to take black and white photographs in color.

In fact, computer technology made it possible to obtain (and, most importantly, to fix) the image that Prokudin-Gorsky received on the screen using his projector.

For many shots, just combining three color channels has proven to be enough to produce an almost perfect color image that requires no further manipulation.

Another issue is that most of the shots were initially “defective” due to incorrect exposure of one or more plates, or were badly damaged during storage. Here, computer technology allows you to restore the natural balance of colors and restore the image.

Thus, computer technology makes it possible to obtain those colors that were originally laid down in a triple negative.

***

We touched only on the most common and significant myths about Prokudin-Gorsky. Along with them on the Web and printed literature there are many more various errors, inaccuracies, misconceptions.

There are also statements that cannot yet be unequivocally called fiction, but they cannot be documented in any way. For example, about apprenticeship with Mendeleev, about shooting the royal family, or about showing the first color films in Russia.

In fact, we don't even know half of the pioneer of Russian color photography. Each year of research brings more and more surprises, discoveries and mysteries. And this Prokudin-Gorsky is especially interesting!

The incredible brightness of colors, the freshness of color and the accuracy of details are what amazes when looking at the pictures taken by Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky.

It is hard to believe that these shots were taken by a Russian photographer at the very beginning of the 20th century - the quality of these images and the accuracy with which they reproduced life surpass many shots taken with modern equipment.

As an inventor, teacher, scientist who studied chemistry under Dmitri Mendeleev and painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts, Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky saw his task as fixing the life of Russia in true color. From 1903 to 1916, he compiled the "Collection of Landmarks of the Russian Empire" - the largest unique collection of color photographs.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky is often called the father of color photography. But this is just one of the widespread myths about the outstanding scientist. The first color photograph in the world was taken in 1861 - two years before the birth of the Russian scientist. The merit of Prokudin-Gorsky is that he transferred this technology to Russia, improved the formulation of sensitizers and reduced the time of the shooting process by several times.

It is no coincidence that Prokudin-Gorsky is considered not only the pioneer of Russian color photography, but also the author of the term "motherland studies". The photographer intended to use his collection for education - to install a projector in every school and gymnasium in Russia to show the younger generation wealth and beauty home country. New Item should have been called "homeland studies". These lessons were never introduced in the schools of Tsarist Russia - the revolution of 1917 interfered with the plan. And the scientist himself emigrated in 1918, having learned about the execution of the royal family, and spent the last years of his life in France.

However, in 2001, a lesson in homeland studies from the once famous compatriot was received by the modern inhabitants of Russia, when the Library of Congress of the United States posted his collection in the public domain.

August 30 marks the 155th anniversary of the birth of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky. With the help of the first biographer of the photographer and a leading specialist in his work, Svetlana Garanina and the founder of the Museum, S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky Vasily Dryuchin, we decided to tell about Prokudin-Gorsky and his activities through ten shots.

Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, 1908

The only color portrait of Leo Tolstoy is one of the most valuable and famous photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky. The picture was taken on May 23, 1908, shortly before the writer's 80th birthday. At the beginning of the month, Prokudin-Gorsky - by that time an authoritative scientist, widely known both in Russia and abroad - wrote a letter to Leo Tolstoy with a proposal to make a color photograph of him. Permission to visit was received. Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky spent two or three days in Yasnaya Polyana and took several photographs of Leo Tolstoy and his estate. However, most of the originals of this series have been lost. The color-separated negatives of the portraits of Leo Tolstoy made by Prokudin-Gorsky have not been found. This portrait is reproduced from the author's lithographic print.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky spent two or three days in Yasnaya Polyana and took several photographs of Leo Tolstoy and his estate. However, most of the originals of this series have been lost. The color-separated negatives of the portraits of Leo Tolstoy made by Prokudin-Gorsky have not been found. This portrait is reproduced from the author's lithographic print.

"Due to the extremely unfavorable position of the area for photographing, it was taken in the garden, in the shade falling from the house, and the background was brightly lit by the sun. The photograph was taken at five and a half o'clock in the evening, immediately after Lev Nikolayevich's horse ride.<...>In print, the portrait is reproduced without any corrections and embellishments in order to preserve all the value of the reproduction's authenticity," wrote Prokudin-Gorsky.

This note by a Russian photographer-artist "To the jubilee portrait of Count L.N. Tolstoy" in the Central State Historical Archive of Leningrad was found by a former graduate student of the Moscow state institution culture, and now the leading expert on the work of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky Svetlana Garanina. In 1970, both a note and a photograph of Leo Tolstoy were published in an issue of the journal Science and Life.

Lunch at the mowing, 1909

Going on his expeditions in Russia, Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky wanted to capture the life of the hinterland, including for the townspeople, so that they would understand the beauty and diversity of their native country. Like many Russian intellectuals, the researcher believed that the custodian of Russian identity, way of life and foundations of Russia are the peasants.

This picture was taken presumably in June 1909 on the banks of the Sheksna River near Cherepovets, the area itself was flooded in 1941–1947 by the Rybinsk Reservoir. The picture shows that Prokudin-Gorsky approached the process as an artist, conveying the pictorial image of the peasants.

"According to some reports, a reproduction of this particular photograph hung in Prokudin-Gorsky's room until his death in Paris," said Vasily Dryuchin.

Peasant girls, 1909

A portrait of peasant girls in colorful sundresses holding berries in their hands is one of the brightest and most famous photographs from the ethnographic series of photographs of peasants on the banks of the Sheksna River. The picture was taken in the village of Topornya.

Restorer: Sergey Sverdlov

A fragment of this particular photograph was chosen for the design of the section of the US Library of Congress website, where materials from the Prokudin-Gorsky collection are posted.

One of the secrets of the fact that Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs are literally filled with life was that he reduced the exposure time of the photographing process to 1-3 seconds. Before him, models had to sit still for about 15 seconds. Hence - the naturalness and realism of people and objects in the photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky.

Mugan. Settler's family, presumably 1912

In order to capture the images of Russian peasants, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled not only to the neighboring provinces, but also to the far outskirts of the empire. The picture "Family of a settler. Settlement Grafovka" belongs to this series. It was made in the Russian settlement of Mugan in the Baku province (the territory of modern Azerbaijan).

The tsarist government began to actively populate the South Caucasus from the middle of the 19th century. A significant part of the settlers were Russian peasants who professed dissident views - Molokans, Old Believers, Dukhobors, Subbotniks, etc. They were resettled in whole communities in the Baku province for apostasy. Mugan became one of the areas of settlement by Russians. Prokudin-Gorsky recorded historical process this colonization. In the picture - Russian settlers-Molokans.

This photo graced the cover of the first edition dedicated to Prokudin-Gorsky, Allshaus' album "Photographs for the Tsar" (New York, 1980).

Unknown woman on a veranda in Lugano, 1908

The difficulty for researchers of Prokudin-Gorsky's work lies in the fact that the professor did not describe in detail the locations and circumstances of his filming. Some stories he shared in the magazine "Amateur Photographer", of which he became editor-in-chief in 1906. Most detailed description- this is a shooting of Leo Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana. The circumstances and stories behind the creation of other photographs are collected bit by bit.

One of the most mysterious parts of the Prokudin-Gorsky collection is photographs of representatives of the nobility. The researchers of his work, despite years of searching, have not yet been able to accurately determine their names.

Restoration: Stanislav Pustovit

This photo portrait was taken on the terrace of a hotel near the railway station in Lugano (Switzerland). According to Vasily Dryuchin, Prokudin-Gorsky came to Lugano to visit the former editor of the magazine "Amateur Photographer" Adrian Lavrov. "There are various assumptions about who is depicted in the picture, but none of them was 100% confirmed," said Vasily Dryuchin. According to one version, the picture may show eldest daughter Prokudina-Gorsky Ekaterina, at that time she was 15 years old. However, Catherine's own son, the now deceased Dmitry Svechin, did not recognize his mother in the stranger.

A group of participants in the railway construction, 1916

The captured participants in the construction of the Murmansk railway remain unknown. Despite many years of efforts, the researchers identified only one person in the picture - chief physician Sergei Serebrennikov (left in a gray suit).

Restorers: Konstantin and Vladimir Khodakovsky

During the First World War, in the summer of 1916, Prokudin-Gorsky made his last photographic expedition to build a section of the Murmansk railway. The road began to be built in a hurry, it was supposed to change the course of the war.

The picture was taken at the pier in the village of Kem-Pristan (Kemsky district, Karelia). On it is a group of civil engineers who worked on the construction of the Murmansk railway. They are sitting on an unfinished deep-water pier, to which the ships of the allied countries with weapons and ammunition should soon begin to moor. At that time, no one could have imagined that in a few years, in the 1920s, steamboats would take people from this pier to the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp.

Emir of Bukhara, 1911

Recording the life of the Russian Empire, Prokudin-Gorsky made several trips around Central Asia. “In January 1907, he and his assistants went to Samarkand to film a solar eclipse,” said Svetlana Garanina. earthquake, the temples were destroyed. The monuments of Samarkand in color are preserved in the photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky. Now in Central Asia his name is known better than in our country."

This picture was taken in 1911 during a trip to Bukhara, which in those years was a vassal state of the Russian Empire. On it is Seyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara (ascended the throne in 1910).

Restorer: WalterStudio, 2000–2001 (Library of Congress)

For the history of photography, this photograph is valuable because it demonstrates the highest level of Prokudin-Gorsky's technology in color reproduction.

The photographer used technology based on the research of the Englishman James Maxwell and the Frenchman Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron, who patented the triple color separation method. In 1902, Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky studied at a photomechanical school in Germany with Professor Adolf Mite, who designed a camera for three-color photography and a projector for displaying color images.

The method consists in the fact that a colored object is filmed on a black and white glass plate from one point through three light filters - blue, green and red.

"One of these three glasses lets through all the red, orange and yellow rays of the spectrum, delaying all the rest; the other lets through all the green rays and traps all the rest; the third lets through the blue, blue and violet rays, but does not let the rest through," Prokudin himself explained. Gorsky. The positives were then viewed through a projector with three lenses. Each frame was projected through a light filter of the corresponding color. The addition of three images reproduced the color of the object very accurately.

Along with triple color separation in Europe and Russia, another method of color photography was actively developed - autochrome, which was patented in 1904 by the Lumiere brothers. Prokudin-Gorsky studied the photographic plates of the Lumiere brothers after their mass production began in 1907. As a result, the Russian photographer preferred the complex technology of successive exposures using Mite's camera. Autochrome was much inferior in color quality and gave a grainy picture. However, it is this technology that has become widespread due to more simple process photographing. After Prokudin-Gorsky in Russia, color photography using triple color separation was not developed.

View of the monastery of St. Nil Stolbensky, 1910

The photo shows the Epiphany Cathedral of the Nilovaya Hermitage on Lake Seliger. Prokudin-Gorsky chose the Svetlitsa Peninsula as a shooting point.

Restoration: WalterStudio, 2000–2001 (Library of Congress)

The Monastery of the Nil Desert was founded on Stolbny Island at the end of the 16th century. It was widely known throughout Russia as one of the most visited holy places by pilgrims. The photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky depict the architecture of the monastery, which mid-nineteenth century.

The building was damaged during the years of Soviet power, and interior decoration The Epiphany Cathedral, as Prokudin-Gorsky captured it, is almost completely lost.

This photograph became the emblem of the exhibition "The Empire That Was Russia" organized by the US Library of Congress in 2001 - it was from it that the awakening of interest in the legacy of the Russian photographer began.

Church of the Nativity of Christ in Krokhin, 1909

A photograph of the Church of the Nativity in Krokhin (Belozersky district of the Vologda region) was taken by Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky in 1909. In the same year, an important event took place in the life of Prokudin-Gorsky and in the development of his business - the scientist received an offer to present his photographs to Emperor Nicholas II.

Restorer: Yuri Katanov

A fateful show for the Prokudin-Gorsky collection took place on May 3 in Tsarskoye Selo. "Exactly at half past nine, the Arab on duty (the manuscript most likely made a typo. It means the arap - TASS note) announced: "Their Imperial Majesties" and the Sovereign, the Empress with their elder daughters and close retinues entered the hall. After the first pictures, when I heard the Sovereign's approving whisper, I was already confident of success, since the program was selected by me in increasing order of effectiveness "(Spelling and punctuation of the originals preserved - approx. TASS)," Prokudin-Gorsky recalled in the introduction to his memoirs , dated 1932 (author's spelling and punctuation preserved). After that, the photographer received official support for documenting the Russian Empire. It consisted in the following: Prokudin-Gorsky was provided with a specially equipped railway car and a small steamer, and the royal office also issued documents that gave him permission to film all the territories of the empire. All other expenses for equipment and maintenance of the expedition Prokudin-Gorsky still paid from his own funds, realizing the importance of his work for his contemporaries and for future generations.

Now the village of Krokhina does not exist, it was flooded in 1961 when the Sheksninsky reservoir was filled. The ruins of white walls, melting every year, protrude from the water. This is what is left of the Church of the Nativity.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky and his assistant Nikolai Selivanov during the shooting, presumably 1909

Until recently, it was believed that the pictures depicting Prokudin-Gorsky himself in the process of filming did not survive. However, in 2017, the granddaughter of his assistant Nikolai Selivanov, Irina Epshtein, handed over to the Prokudin-Gorsky Museum materials from the family archive - documents and photographs depicting the master with his entourage.

It is assumed that this picture was taken on the banks of the Sheksna River. Most likely, it captures the process of taking the photo "Lunch at the mowing". Next to Sergei Mikhailovich is a 16-year-old teenager in a cap. This is the master's chief assistant Nikolay Selivanov (1892–1957). In 1908, together with his son Dmitry Prokudin-Gorsky, he accompanied the photographer to Yasnaya Polyana for the filming of Leo Tolstoy. Then he participated in many expeditions of Prokudin-Gorsky and until the end of his life he worked at the State Optical Institute in Leningrad. This photograph was first presented at the exhibition "Unknown Prokudin-Gorsky" in 2017 at the Museum of Contemporary History of Russia.

The irony of time is that a person who has been striving all his life to grab and fix it, found himself on long years forgotten at home. The emigrant relatives of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky in 1948 were forced to sell the collection to the US Library of Congress: the difficult situation of Russian emigrants in Paris and the lack of conditions necessary to preserve the collection affected. Only in the early 2000s in Russia did the name of Prokudin-Gorsky again begin to gain fame.

However, it is too early to say that his legacy has been fully appreciated. On the territory of Russia, there is not yet a single memorial plaque dedicated to Prokudin-Gorsky, neither in St. Petersburg, where the researcher's apartment and printing house were located, nor in Kirzhach, not far from where he was born. The memory of him is supported by enthusiasts. In 2016, at the initiative of Vasily Dryuchin, a teacher of computer science and a researcher of photography, the Prokudin-Gorsky Museum was opened in the state general education school Moscow "Romanov School".

S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky is much more than just a talented scientist-inventor or an outstanding photographer, he is the author of a real miracle that will never cease to amaze people

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky belonged to one of the oldest noble families in Russia, whose representatives faithfully served their country for more than five centuries.

The Tatar prince (Murza Musa), who left the Golden Horde with his sons, is considered the founder of the Prokudin-Gorsky family. In Rus', he converted to Orthodoxy and received the name Peter. In 1380, under the banner of Dmitry Donskoy, he fought on the Kulikovo field and lost all his sons in that great battle. However, the family did not stop there, according to family tradition, Grand Duke Dmitry Ivanovich, appreciating the devotion and courage of Peter, gave him one of the princesses of the Rurik dynasty, whose name was Maria, and also endowed him with a "patrimony called Gora." This is where the surname Gorsky came from.

The memory of those distant events was reflected in the Prokudin-Gorsky family coat of arms:

The father of S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky, Mikhail Nikolayevich, wrote in 1880: "The coat of arms of our family means: the star and the moon - origin from the Tatars, the scales - probably the service of some kind in a court order, and the Nepryadva River - participation in the Battle of Kulikovo."

The grandson of Peter Gorsky, Prokopy Alferievich, was nicknamed Prokuda, which is why his descendants began to be called Prokudin-Gorsky.

The family estate of the Prokudin-Gorsky Funikov Gora was located 18 versts east of Kirzhach.

It was a village back in the 16th century, but in 1607 it was burnt down by the Polish-Lithuanian invaders, along with the church located there in honor of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Since then, Funikova Gora has become a village. Until 1778, it was part of the Vladimir, and then - the Pokrovsky district of the Vladimir province. Although since 1996 a story has been circulating in print media that “this settlement no longer exists”, the village of Funikova Gora, Kirzhachsky district, has survived. Its old-timers remember their great countryman and willingly show the guest the remains of an old manor garden.

Following one of the grandsons of the voivode Peter, who had the nickname Prokuda, the genus received a surname Prokudin(Prakudin), and in 1792 the second part "Gorsky" was officially added to it (by the name of the estate, or maybe in memory of the legendary ancestor - governor Petr Gorsky?). From now on, representatives of the genus began to be called "Prokudin-Gorsky".

For centuries, this glorious family served Russia, one can list its merits for a long time: governors, diplomats, heroes of Austerlitz, participants in the militia of 1812 and the defense of Sevastopol in the Crimean War, the first Kirzhach marshal of the nobility, and what is the name of Mikhail Ivanovich Prokudin-Gorsky (1744-1812 ) - one of the first Russian writers and playwrights!

The great-grandson of the latter, a pioneer of color photography, a talented scientist-inventor, teacher and public figure Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was born on August 18 (according to the new style - 30) August 1863 in the family estate of Funikov Gora and was baptized two days later in the Church of Michael the Archangel of the Arkhangelsk churchyard. This church has survived and is now gradually being revived.

When the temple began to be restored, in 2008 it was found in the grass granite monument... to another Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, who was the brother of our photographer's grandfather and was the customer for the construction of the church. He died in 1841:

There is practically no information about the first 20 years of the life of S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky. His father, Mikhail Nikolayevich, having served in the Caucasus (in the Tiflis Grenadier Regiment), retired in 1862 with the rank of second lieutenant. In the same year he married and settled in the family estate of Funikov Gora. In 1865, he filed a petition to appoint him to serve as a clerical officer of the Vladimir Nobility Assembly, since the possession of 80 souls of peasants in Funikova Gora, and "for the mother of one hundred and forty souls," did not allow him to support his family in abundance. In connection with the service of Mikhail Nikolaevich in Vladimir, his family, obviously, in 1865-67. lived in this city. In 1867, Sergei's father entered the Kovrov guardianship as a noble assessor, served here until 1872, having received the rank of chamber junker. Newspapers for 1873-75 mention his name as an agent of the Yaroslavl-Kostroma land bank in Murom. Also in Murom in 1875, one of the sons of Mikhail Nikolayevich (Aleksey, who died in infancy) was baptized. In 1875-77. he already worked as an "honorary guardian" of the Mytsky two-class ministerial school (the village of Myt, Gorokhovetsky district), and from 1878 - a supernumerary official of the office of the Council of the Imperial Humanitarian Society with the rank of chamberlain. Probably, moving to St. Petersburg was connected with this position. However, in 1880, Mikhail Nikolaevich signed his article in the Russian Starina magazine “Mikhail Prokudin-Gorsky. Gor. Kirzhach. At the same time, it is not known exactly where Sergei himself lived since 1875, since his parents were already divorced by that time.

ABOUT primary education Nothing is known about Sergei either, it may have been homemade. When the boy grew up, he was sent to be educated in St. Petersburg, in the famous Alexander Lyceum, from where his father took him three years later for some reason.

The further history of the young years of our hero until now is a collection of myths and misconceptions coming from the book of Robert Allshaus "Photographs for the Tsar" ("Photographs for the Tsar", 1980), which contains the very first version of the biography of Sergei Mikhailovich. According to the author, Prokudin-Gorsky, after graduating from the Technological Institute in 1889, went abroad, where for some time he taught chemistry at the Higher Technical School in Charlottenburg, where he lectured on spectral analysis and photochemistry. Allshaus writes further that “it was during his stay in Germany that Prokudin-Gorsky became interested in studying the scientific problems of color photography and came into contact with Adolf Miet, who headed the department of chemistry, previously headed by Dr. Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, the father of orthochromatism, at the Higher Technical School in Berlin ". After that, Prokudin-Gorsky, according to Allshaus, moved to Paris and continued his studies in the laboratory of the famous chemist Edme Jules Momenet, who was engaged in research in the field of color photography. Then de Prokudin-Gorsky returned to Russia (in the early 1890s?) and enthusiastically plunged into his chosen business.

In fact, after leaving the Alexander Lyceum, from October 1886 to November 1888, Prokudin-Gorsky listened to lectures on the natural section at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University. There is information, not yet documented, that the future pioneer of color photography was a student of Dmitri Mendeleev himself. Indeed, during the period of Prokudin-Gorsky's studies at St. Petersburg University, Mendeleev was in charge of the laboratory there. Allshaus's book mentioned above contains the following passage: "In 1922, in his biographical notes, he proudly recalled his studies with Mendeleev, mentioning how in 1887, at the age of 53, he made a solo flight on hot-air balloon to observe a solar eclipse. Unfortunately, in 1980, at the ridiculous request of the publisher, all references to sources were removed from the book, and today, 30 years later, the author can no longer remember where he found these “biographical notes” of 1922. No other researcher of Prokudin’s life Gorsky did not see them! Nevertheless, in Russia, the fact of Mendeleev's solo flight in a balloon in 1887 is well known, and it was during this period that Prokudin-Gorsky's short studies at St. Petersburg University fell (which Allshaus did not know about). It is impossible to come up with such a thing, which means that the biographical notes of 1922 really existed and they have yet to be found.

Perhaps it was Mendeleev who aroused the young Prokudin-Gorsky's interest in chemistry. It is interesting to note that around the same years, one of the scientific problems that the brilliant Russian chemist dealt with was orthochromatism, the doctrine of the correct reproduction of color in black and white (!) Photography. This problem was directly related to the development of the method of color photography by color separation, which Prokudin-Gorsky would use in the next century.

However, at that moment, obviously, there was no question of any serious studies in chemistry and, especially, color photography.

For some unknown reason, Prokudin-Gorsky left the university and in September 1888 became a student at the Imperial Military Medical Academy, which he also did not graduate for some reason.

But his education was not limited to this. Sergei Mikhailovich was a very gifted and versatile person - according to some reports, he took painting lessons at the Academy of Arts, and even seriously took a great interest in playing the violin. But his musical ambitions were not destined to come true - R. Allshaus mentions that in the chemical laboratory the young Prokudin-Gorsky badly injured his hand, which is indirectly confirmed by other sources.

In May 1890, having said goodbye to the Military Medical Academy, Prokudin-Gorsky entered the service of the Demidov House of Workers' Charity, as its full member. This social institution for girls from poor families was founded in 1830 at the expense of the well-known philanthropist Anatoly Demidov and was in the Department of Institutions of Empress Maria Feodorovna, i.e. was part of the state apparatus. Accordingly, it was in the Demidov House that he climbed the career ladder for more than 10 years, receiving ranks from the state. For example, in 1903, as a full member of the Prokudin-Gorsky house, he had the rank of titular adviser.

In 1894, the Demidov House of Diligence was renamed the house of "Anatoly Demidov" and transformed into the first women's commercial school in Russia. What exactly S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky did in this social and educational institution is not yet known, but it can already be said how he got there at all. If you open the publication "Address-calendar. The general list of commanding and other officials in all departments in the Russian Empire for 1888 ”, it can be found that Mikhail Nikolaevich Prokudin-Gorsky is listed among the honorary members of the Demidov Charity House. The father clearly wanted to guide his son in his footsteps.

In 1890, Prokudin-Gorsky marries Anna Alexandrovna Lavrova (1870-1937), the daughter of a well-known metallurgist, one of the founders of the domestic steel cannon industry, an active member of the Imperial Russian Technical Society, Major General of Artillery Alexander Stepanovich Lavrov (1836-1904), who was the director of the Association of Gatchina Bell, Copper and Steel Works. Under the patronage of his father-in-law, Prokudin-Gorsky is a member of the board of this large enterprise.

Although the main place of work (Demidov House) is in St. Petersburg, Prokudin-Gorsky settled in Gatchina, where his children Dmitry (1892), Catherine (1893) and Mikhail (1895) were born.

The influence of the father-in-law for some time determined the range of scientific interests of Prokudin-Gorsky. The young scientist becomes a member of the first chemical-technological department of the Imperial Russian Technical Society, where in 1896 he made his first report "On state of the art foundry business in Russia. Gradually, however, photography begins to attract his attention more and more. In 1898, he also became a member of the photographic department of the IRTS and speaks at a meeting of the department with a report “On photographing shooting stars (Star rains)”, publishes the first of a series of his works on the technical aspects of photography: “On printing from negatives” and “On photographing handheld cameras.

In the same 1898, at the 5th photographic exhibition organized by the photographic department of the IRTO, Prokudin-Gorsky presented photographs taken from oil paintings by artists of the 17th-18th centuries. Probably, it was then that he turned to the problem of orthochromatism, since in a black and white photograph it is necessary to reflect all the colors of the picture in different tones, even if they have the same intensity.

Obviously, photography is increasingly capturing Prokudin-Gorsky, not only in scientific and theoretical, but also in practical terms. It begins to show business, entrepreneurial qualities, the desire to put scientific knowledge and experience at the service of own business to achieve not only scientific recognition, but also complete financial independence. On August 2, 1901, in St. Petersburg, at B. Podyacheskaya 22, the “photozincographic and phototechnical workshop” of S.M. Sergei Mikhailovich.

Prokudin-Gorsky enters the 20th century with a new passion that will bring him worldwide fame - color photography, the transfer of the natural colors of the world around in the picture!

Here it is necessary to make a small digression into history. Back in 1861, in the year of the abolition of serfdom in Russia, the English physicist James Clerk Maxwell conducted an amazing experiment: he removed a colorful ribbon three times through green, red and blue filters. Lighting the resulting negatives through the same filters, he managed to get a color image - the world's first color photograph.

This method was called "color separation", but it took another 40 years of hard work by the best European scientists, including Prokudin-Gorsky, for this technology to correctly convey all natural colors, capturing their slightest shades. To do this, glass plates had to be coated with a special emulsion of complex composition, making them equally sensitive to the entire color spectrum.

Prokudin-Gorsky worked on this problem in 1902 in the laboratory of the Higher Technical School in Charlottenburg near Berlin under the guidance of another outstanding scientist, Professor Adolf Mite(1862-1927), at that time the chief specialist in the method of color separation. Already in 1901, this German managed to design a camera for color photography, and on April 9, 1902, A. Mite showed his color photographs to the royal people. Thus, the technical basis for creating photographic "pictures in natural paints" was created.

In December 1902, at a meeting of the 5th department of the IRTS, Prokudin-Gorsky made a report on the creation of color transparencies according to the method of A. Mite and spoke very warmly about the work under the leadership of the latter.

However, in the end, as they later wrote in the Russian press, "the student surpassed the teacher." Using his outstanding knowledge of chemistry, Prokudin-Gorsky created his own emulsion recipe, which provided the most perfect color reproduction at that time, i.e. full naturalness of colors.

In 1903, the best German firms Görtz and Bermpol built special equipment for color shooting and projection of the received color images according to the drawings of A. Mite for Prokudin-Gorsky. Even then, Prokudin-Gorsky could print his color photographs in a very decent quality in the form of postcards and book illustrations, but their true beauty and quality were revealed only by projecting the image directly from the plate onto a large screen. During the first demonstrations of such slides (in modern terms) in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the winter of 1905, the audience could not hide their amazement and delight at what they saw, got up from their seats and gave the author a standing ovation. The era of color photography has begun in Russia!

Having barely received equipment and photographic materials at his disposal, Prokudin-Gorsky hurries to capture in “natural colors” his vast country with all its many sights and beautiful corners.

The exact date of the start of color photography by Prokudin-Gorsky in the Russian Empire has not yet been documented, but it can be stated with a high degree of certainty that he made his first trip for the purpose of color photography already in September-October 1903, capturing the autumn beauty of the Karelian Isthmus, the Saimaa Canal and Saimaa Lake.

Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about the early period"collection of sights" in natural colors, it is necessary to restore its chronology and geography using very fragmentary information.

It is known that already in April 1904, Prokudin-Gorsky went to one of the most inaccessible corners of the European part of Russia - the formidable Dagestan mountains, where he photographed the famous village of Gunib and the surrounding gorges and villages, as well as types of local residents. To this day, it remains a mystery by whom and for what purpose this distant expedition was organized.

In the summer of 1904, Prokudin-Gorsky takes pictures of the southern beauties of the Black Sea coast (Gagra and New Athos), then there will be colorful Little Russian farms in Kursk province, snow-white winter landscapes at his dacha near Luga. There are almost no conditions for shooting. To change the cassettes, he built a makeshift camping tent. There is also not enough money for filming.

After the first success of his color projections in public shows, the photographer wonders how to continue to use such a wonderful invention? Undoubtedly, it should bring some income, especially since he, the pioneer of color photography, is an absolute monopolist in Russia so far.

The answer seems to lie on the surface: at that time, postcards were the only way to mass-distribute photography, which really did sell quite well. In addition, the photozincography workshop at Podyacheskaya 22 has long mastered their production, incl. and in color.

In the spring of 1905, Prokudin-Gorsky turned to the Community of St. Eugenia (St. Petersburg Red Cross) with a project to capture half of Russia in color and publish these pictures as the first color photographic postcards in the history of our country. Receives an advance payment from the community for this enterprise and sets off again, ignoring the revolutionary chaos that has begun!

Over a short period of time, more than 300 views of St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Kursk, Sevastopol (including the battleship Potemkin!), Almost the entire Crimea, Novorossiysk, Sochi, Gagra were filmed. Next in line is shooting Moscow, Odessa, Kharkov, Riga, Revel, Pskov. And then the photographer suffers the first cruel blow of history: due to the complete breakdown of the economy in the country, the Community of St. Eugenia is not able to pay for his work and the contract is touched. Almost all the footage after that disappears without a trace!

For some time, Prokudin-Gorsky stopped his photo expeditions. In 1906-1908. he is busy promoting his achievements in the field of color photography, participating in scientific congresses, teaching and publishing work, editing the magazine "Amateur Photographer". He often travels to Europe, where in 1906 he makes a large series of color sketches of Italy.

An important step in his early work was a trip to Turkestan in December 1906-January 1907 to photograph a solar eclipse with an expedition of the Russian Geographical Society, of which he became a member back in 1900. It was not possible to capture the eclipse in color due to thick clouds, but Prokudin-Gorsky with he photographed with enthusiasm the ancient monuments of Bukhara and Samarkand, colorful local and types, and much more, which seemed to a resident of St. Petersburg a real exotic. It was probably at that moment that Prokudin-Gorsky began to realize that the most important purpose of color photography is not just postcard views, but the capture of everything that is the true sights of the Russian Empire. It must be assumed that this opinion was even more strengthened after the news of a strong earthquake in Turkestan in October 1907, which caused fears for the fate of many dilapidated monuments (fortunately, at that time they were not particularly affected).

Many more months passed in everyday worries: Prokudin-Gorsky had to deal with family affairs, scientific work, teaching, editing a magazine, managing his photomechanical workshop, participating in public life, exhibitions, congresses, conventions, showing his projections, etc., etc.

But all this time the thought of the great purpose of color photography does not leave him, he is looking for the possibilities of its application. In the spring of 1908, Prokudin-Gorsky came up with the idea of ​​making a color photographic portrait of his most prominent contemporary, the writer Leo Tolstoy, who was celebrating his 80th birthday. Permission to shoot was received and on May 22-23, Prokudin-Gorsky spends in Yasnaya Polyana, where he creates, probably, the most famous photographic portrait in the history of Russia, and also captures views of the estate for posterity. Printed in the form of postcards, magazine illustrations and "wall paintings", this portrait was distributed throughout the country, and with it the fame of the "master of natural color".

Prokudin-Gorsky is increasingly being invited to demonstrate his wonderful projections at evenings where high society gathers. One of the Grand Dukes became interested in his work. In the autumn of 1908, Prokudin-Gorsky, at the invitation of Empress Maria Feodorovna, made a trip to the Romanovs' villa in the suburbs of Copenhagen.

And then ... the Sovereign Emperor himself invites him to an audience. It was a star ticket and Prokudin-Gorsky does not miss his chance.

May 3, 1909 took place fateful meeting with the Tsar, described in detail by the photographer in his memoirs of 1932.

Fascinated by the shown color photographs, Nicholas II provides Prokudin-Gorsky with the necessary vehicles and gives permission to shoot in any place so that the photographer can capture “in natural colors” all the main sights of the Russian Empire from Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. In total, it is planned to take 10,000 photographs over 10 years. Prokudin-Gorsky wanted to use these unique photographic materials, first of all, for the purposes of public education - to install a projector in each school and show to the younger generation all the wealth and beauty of the boundless country on color slides-transparencies. This new academic subject was to be called Motherland Studies!

A few days after meeting with the Tsar, Prokudin-Gorsky sets off on the first expedition of his new project - along the Mariinsky waterway from St. Petersburg almost to the Volga itself, the shooting is timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the opening of this waterway. In the autumn of the same 1909, a survey was made of the northern part of the industrial Urals. In 1910, Prokudin-Gorsky made two trips along the Volga, capturing it from its very source to Nizhny Novgorod. In between, in the summer, he shoots the southern part of the Urals.

In the summer of 1911, numerous monuments of antiquity were removed in Kostroma and the Yaroslavl province. For the upcoming anniversary of 1812, the places around Borodino were captured. In the spring and autumn of 1911, the photographer manages to visit the Trans-Caspian region and Turkestan twice more, where he tried color filming for the first time in history!

1912 became no less eventful - from March to September, Prokudin-Gorsky makes two photo expeditions to the Caucasus, photographs the Mugan steppe, undertakes a grandiose trip along the planned Kama-Tobolsk waterway, conducts extensive surveys of areas associated with the memory of Patriotic war 1812 - from Maloyaroslavets to Lithuanian Vilna, photographs Ryazan, Suzdal, the construction of the Kuzminskaya and Beloomutovskaya dams on the Oka.

However, in the midst of a project to capture Russia in color, it suddenly stops for reasons that are not entirely clear. According to the most convincing version, the photographer simply ran out of funds, since all the work, except for transportation costs, was carried out at his personal expense. From 1910, Prokudin-Gorsky negotiated with the government to purchase his unique collection for the state treasury in order to provide funding for further expeditions. After much consideration, his proposal was supported by the high level, but in the end ... everything ended in nothing and the collection was never redeemed.

Perhaps it was precisely in view of financial problems that since 1913 Prokudin-Gorsky has been paying more and more attention to entrepreneurial activity, placing special emphasis on attracting large capitalists to his projects. In January 1913, he establishes a limited partnership under the firm " Trading house S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky and Co.

In March 1914, the Joint Stock Company "Biochrome" was organized (services for color photography and printing of photographs) with a fixed capital of 2 million rubles, to which all the property of the "Trading House" was transferred. Prokudin-Gorsky, with a very modest stake, is on the board. Probably, as his contribution to the authorized capital, he transfers the rights to his collection of photographs to Biochrome.

In 1913-1914. Prokudin-Gorsky, with all his inherent passion, is engaged in the creation of color cinema, for which he receives a patent together with his colleague and companion Sergei Olimpievich Maksimovich.

Tireless inventors set themselves the task of creating a color film system that could be used in wide distribution, without which the commercial success of this enterprise was impossible. In the summer of 1914, everything was built in France necessary equipment for shooting and showing color films, but the outbreak of the First World War prevented the further development of this new project. None of Prokudin-Gorsky's experimental color films, including the filming of the exit of the royal procession in 1913, has yet been found.

As Sergei Mikhailovich himself wrote in his memoirs in 1932, with the onset of the war, he had to give up his specially equipped car, and himself deal with censorship of cinematographic tapes arriving from abroad, teaching Russian pilots to shoot from airplanes.

But already in 1915, in the conditions of the war, Prokudin-Gorsky suddenly returned to "the work of his life," as he called color photography. With the help of the Biochrom joint-stock company founded back in 1913, he is trying to organize the mass production of inexpensive transparencies from the pictures of his collection. In the same 1915, these transparencies went on open sale, but, probably, the business was not commercially successful, especially in difficult wartime conditions. So far, researchers have not been able to find in Russia a single copy of these "paintings for a magic lantern."

Another interesting event in the creative biography of Prokudin-Gorsky dates back to 1915 - the creation of two wonderful anniversary photo portraits of the great Russian singer Fyodor Chaliapin, who was captured in the stage costumes of Mephistopheles and Boris Godunov. These pictures were published in several editions at once, thanks to which we can admire them, despite the negatives that have not disappeared without a trace.

In the summer of 1916, Prokudin-Gorsky made his last photographic expedition to Russia, taking pictures of the newly rebuilt southern section of the Murmansk railway, including the Austro-German prisoner of war camps. By whose order and for what purposes this survey of secret military facilities was made remains a mystery to this day.

After October revolution 1917 Prokudin-Gorsky continued to lead for several more months vigorous activity in Russia: he became a member of the organizing committee of the Higher Institute of Photography and Phototechnics, in March 1918 he demonstrated his photographs in the Winter Palace to the general public as part of the “Color Photography Evenings”, organized at the initiative of the External School Department of the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR. People's Commissar Lunacharsky himself, who turned out to be a great connoisseur and connoisseur of color photography, gave an opening speech before the show.

In general, it must be said that the knowledge and experience of Sergei Mikhalovich were indeed in demand by the new government, primarily as a major specialist in color printing. On May 25, 1918, the head of the Soviet government, V. I. Lenin, instructed that Prokudin-Gorsky be included in the board of the Expedition for the Procurement of State Papers. The Prokudin printing house at 22 B. Podyacheskaya Street was now receiving orders from the Soviet authorities. For example, in the same 1918, the Kommunist publishing house ordered a cliché for V. M. Velichkina's book "Switzerland" there.

In August 1918, Prokudin-Gorsky, on behalf of the People's Commissariat of Education, went on a business trip to Norway in order to purchase projection equipment for lower schools. Perhaps the master at that moment had a hope that the new government would allow him to fulfill his dream, which never came true under the tsarist regime - so that millions of schoolchildren and students all over Russia would see his color photographs? But he was no longer destined to return to his homeland. The civil war that began in the country made it almost impossible to further work in the field of color photography and cinema. The business trip turned into emigration.

In May 1919, Prokudin-Gorsky managed to assemble a group in Norway to continue work on color cinema. However, the preparations faced great difficulties, because, as the photographer himself later wrote, “Norway is a country completely unsuitable for scientific and technical work.”

Therefore, in September 1919, he moved from Norway to England, where he continued to work on the creation of color films. All the equipment had to be made anew, literally “on the knee”, as there was a catastrophic lack of money. The local partners involved in the project were neither generous nor reliable. In addition, competitors were advancing on their heels - color cinema in Europe by the beginning of the 1920s. already actively mastered by several firms, although it was still far from its wide commercial application.

From 1921 until his death in 1944, Prokudin-Gorsky lived in France, where in 1923-25. members of his family moved from Russia. The last to leave the USSR, in March 1925, were his first wife and daughter Ekaterina with her son Dmitry. In 1920, Sergei Mikhailovich marries his employee Maria Fedorovna Shchedrina; in 1921 their daughter Elena was born.

By 1923, work on the creation of color films had finally suffered a financial collapse. The idea of ​​moving to the United States to continue work dates back to this moment, but for some reason it remained unrealized (perhaps due to the illness of Sergei Mikhailovich). The emigrant scientist had only to engage in the usual photo craft with his sons in order to somehow feed himself in a foreign country.

And what happened to his famous collection? According to the notes of Sergei Mikhailovich himself, "thanks to fortunate circumstances" he managed to obtain permission to export the most interesting part of it. When and under what circumstances this happened is still unknown to anyone. The first mention of the collection in France dates back to the end of 1931, when it began to be shown to compatriot emigrants. In 1932, a note was drawn up on the commercial exploitation of the collection, which became the property of Prokudin-Gorsky's sons Dmitry and Mikhail. It was supposed to purchase a new projection apparatus (to replace the one left in Russia) and to demonstrate pictures in color, as well as to publish them in the form of albums. Apparently, it was not possible to implement this plan, most likely due to the banal lack of necessary funds.

Until 1936, Prokudin-Gorsky lectured at various events of the Russian community in France, showing his photographs, in the same year he published his memoirs of a meeting with Leo Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana.

Sergey Mikhailovich died on September 27, 1944 in the "Russian House" on the outskirts of Paris, shortly after the liberation of the city by the allies. His grave is in the Russian cemetery in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois near Paris.

His collection, which had lain all the years of the occupation in damp Parisian cellars, was sold by his heirs in 1948 to the US Library of Congress. For several decades, it seemed to have been completely forgotten. Only in 2001 all the pictures were scanned, posted on the Internet and became the cultural heritage of mankind. Thanks to the global computer network, the triumphant return of Prokudin-Gorsky to his homeland took place at the beginning of the 21st century.

There are things that are hard to believe, but they really were. We do not always look back in pursuit of our future. Our ancestors performed unprecedented miracles, which not everyone knows about.

1910 On a hillside near Artvin (the territory of modern Turkey), a woman in a national Armenian costume poses for Prokudin-Gorsky.

I propose to fill a huge gap and turn to the times of the early 20th century. It was then that photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, with the support of Emperor Nicholas II, made a photo review of the Russian Empire. Yes, what!

Prokudin-Gorsky photographed areas, people, architecture of the country using a special camera for photographs of his own design.

This miracle camera was able to make three photographs in blue, green and red channels from three black-and-white photographs. After that, the photographic plates were combined and a color image was obtained. To do this, it was necessary to insert photographic plates into three different projectors and direct them to the screen.

Prokudin-Gorsky at the beginning of the 20th century took color photographs, and with high quality Images.

I am sure that you are now looking at these photographs and thinking that all this is not true, and that in fact it is photoshop or, at worst, a modern counterfeit of antiquity. It is hard to believe that the photographs were taken before the First World War. But it is so.

In writing this post, I used materials from the Library of Congress. For more information about Prokudin-Gorsky's work, see loc.gov/exhibits/empire.

1910 Kasli, art casting. From the album Views Ural mountains, review of industrial regions, Russian Empire".

1910 Woman on the river Sim

1909 Chapel on the site where the city of Belozersk was founded

1910 Georgia, view of Tiflis (Tbilisi)

1910 Khorezm. Khan of the Russian Protectorate Isfandiyar II Jurji Bahadur

An enlarged photo of Isfandiyar. Here he is 39 years old. Ruled Khorezm until his death in 1918

1910 Bank of the river Sim, shepherd boy

1910 Hydroelectric power plant in Yolotan Turkmenistan. The photo shows Hungarian-made alternators installed inside the power unit of the power plant

1910 Dagestan women

1909 In the photo, Pinkhus Karlinsky, 84 years old, head of the Chernihiv lock in the 66th year of service

1910 Artvin (now Turkey)

August 30 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the remarkable Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky. A pioneer of Russian color photography, he developed a unique method of photography, thanks to which one can see not in the usual black and white retro image, but as if yesterday photographed in color that Russia that we lost ... Prokudin-Gorsky accomplished an amazing task - he shot between the first Russian Revolution and the First World War, several thousand objects on the territory of the Russian Empire. Thanks to the miraculously preserved negatives, we can see what the Russian Empire looked like in color - and be surprised that "dark, impoverished, backward Russia" dressed brightly, in multi-colored clothes ...

Young Russian peasant women near the Sheksna River. 1909

Builders of the Murmansk railway, Kem-pier.

And it’s not even about the form, it’s enough to look into the faces of that Russia that we have lost ...

Well, about the notorious comparisons with 1913 - now, 100 years later, it is very instructive to look at photographs (which in themselves are a remarkable achievement in photography): a document of the era.

For example, "Ilyich's light bulb", you say? And without the Bolsheviks, would they illuminate the huts with torches? Oh well... :)

The engine room of the Hindu Kush hydroelectric power station on the Murghab River. 1911

And here is a new hotel in Gagra, 1905-1915.
And the pole with wires is visible in the frame.

The photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky help to visually see that bygone era, to feel its charm.

Under the cut - a biography of the photographer, briefly about his method and photographs of Ryazan, taken a hundred years ago ...


Self-portrait of S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky near the Skuritskhali River, 1912. Full version

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky(18 (30) August 1863, Funikova Gora, Pokrovsky district, Vladimir province, Russian Empire - September 27, 1944, Paris, France) - Russian photographer, chemist (student of Mendeleev), inventor, publisher, teacher and public figure, member of the Imperial Russian geographical, Imperial Russian technical and Russian photographic societies. He made a significant contribution to the development of photography and cinematography. Pioneer of color photography in Russia, creator of the Collection of Landmarks of the Russian Empire.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was born on August 18/30, 1863 in the family estate of the Prokudin-Gorsky Funikov Gora in the Pokrovsky district of the Vladimir province. On August 20 (September 1), 1863, he was baptized in the church of the Archangel Michael of the Arkhangelsk churchyard, the closest to the estate.
Until 1886 he studied at the Alexander Lyceum, but did not complete the full course.
From October 1886 to November 1888 he listened to lectures on the natural section at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University.
From September 1888 to May 1890 he was a student of the Imperial Military Medical Academy, which he also did not graduate for some reason. He also studied painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts.
In May 1890, he entered the service of the Demidov Charity House of Workers, as its full member. This social institution for girls from poor families was founded in 1830 at the expense of the well-known philanthropist Anatoly Demidov and was in the Department of Institutions of Empress Maria Feodorovna. In the same 1890, he married Anna Alexandrovna Lavrova (1870-1937), the daughter of a Russian metallurgist and director of the association of Gatchina bell, copper and steel works Lavrov. Prokudin-Gorsky himself became the director of the board at his father-in-law's enterprise.

In 1897, Prokudin-Gorsky began to make reports on technical results of his photographic research to the Fifth Department of the Imperial Russian Technical Society (IRTS) (he continued these reports until 1918). In 1898, Prokudin-Gorsky became a member of the Fifth Photographic Department of the IRTS and made a report "On photographing shooting stars (star showers)". Already at that time he was a Russian authority in the field of photography, he was entrusted with the organization of practical photography courses at the IRTS. In 1898, Prokudin-Gorsky published the first books in a series of works on the technical aspects of photography: "On Printing from Negatives" and "On Photographing with Hand-Held Cameras". In 1900, the Russian Technical Society showed black and white photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky at the World Exhibition in Paris.

On August 2, 1901, S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky’s “photo-zincographic and phototechnical workshop” was opened in St. Petersburg, where in 1906-1909 the laboratory and the editorial office of the Amateur Photographer magazine were located, in which Prokudin-Gorsky published a series of technical articles on the principles of reproduction colors.
In 1902, Prokudin-Gorsky studied for a month and a half at the photomechanical school in Charlottenburg (near Berlin) under the guidance of Dr. Adolf Mite. The latter in the same 1902 created his own model of a camera for color shooting and a projector for demonstrating color images on the screen.

On December 13, 1902, Prokudin-Gorsky first announced the creation of color transparencies using the A. Mite method of three-color photography, and in 1905 he patented his sensitizer, which was significantly superior in quality to similar developments of foreign chemists, including the Mite sensitizer. The composition of the new sensitizer made the silver bromide plate equally sensitive to the entire color spectrum.
In 1903, Prokudin-Gorsky published a pamphlet called Isochromatic Photography with Handheld Cameras.
The exact date of the start of color filming by Prokudin-Gorsky in the Russian Empire has not yet been established. It is most likely that the first series of color photographs was taken during a trip to Finland in September-October 1903.
In 1904, Prokudin-Gorsky took color photographs of Dagestan (April), the Black Sea coast (June) and the Luga district of the St. Petersburg province (December).

In April-September 1905, Prokudin-Gorsky made the first big photo trip around the Russian Empire, during which he took about 400 color photographs of the Caucasus, Crimea and Ukraine (including 38 views of Kyiv). He planned to publish all these pictures in the form of photo postcards under an agreement with the Community of St. Eugenia. However, due to political upheavals in the country and the financial crisis caused by them, the contract was terminated in the same 1905, and only about 90 open letters saw the light.
From April to September 1906, Prokudin-Gorsky spent a lot of time in Europe, participating in scientific congresses and photography exhibitions in Rome, Milan, Paris and Berlin. He received a gold medal at the International Exhibition in Antwerp and a medal for "Best Work" in color photography from the photography club in Nice.

Alim Khan (1880-1944), emir of Bukhara. 1907

In December 1906, Prokudin-Gorsky went to Turkestan for the first time: to photograph the solar eclipse on January 14, 1907 in the Tien Shan mountains near the Chernyaevo station above the Salyukta mines. Although the eclipse could not be captured due to cloudiness, in January 1907 Prokudin-Gorsky took many color photographs of Samarkand and Bukhara.
On September 21, 1907, Prokudin-Gorsky makes a report on his studies of Lumiere plates for color photography, after the report and discussion, color transparencies were designed by Ermilova N. E., Schulz, Natomb and others.

In May 1908, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled to Yasnaya Polyana, where he took a series of photographs (more than 15), including several color photographic portraits of Leo Tolstoy. In his notes, Prokudin-Gorsky noted that the writer "was especially keenly interested in all the latest discoveries in various fields, as well as in the issue of transmitting images in true colors." In addition, two photographic portraits of Fyodor Chaliapin in stage costumes made by Prokudin are known. According to some reports, Prokudin-Gorsky also photographed members of the royal family, but these photographs have not yet been found.

On May 30, 1908, color projections of photographs taken by Prokudin-Gorsky were shown in the halls of the Academy of Arts. His photographs of ancient vases - exhibits of the Hermitage - were subsequently used to restore their lost color.
Prokudin-Gorsky gave lectures on his achievements in the field of color photography, using transparencies, at the Imperial Russian Technical Society, the St. Petersburg Photographic Society and other institutions of the city.
At this time, Sergei Mikhailovich conceived a grandiose project: to capture contemporary Russia, its culture, history and modernization in color photographs.

Prokudin-Gorsky in May 1909 received an audience with Emperor Nicholas II, who instructed him to photograph all sorts of aspects of life in all areas that then made up the Russian Empire. For this, the photographer was allocated a specially equipped railway car. To work on the waterways, the government allocated a small steamer capable of sailing in shallow water with a crew, and for the Chusovaya River - a motor boat. A Ford car was sent to Yekaterinburg for filming the Urals and the Ural Range. Prokudin-Gorsky was issued by the tsarist chancellery with documents that gave access to all places of the empire, and officials were ordered to help Prokudin-Gorsky in his travels.

Sergei Mikhailovich spent all the shooting at his own expense, which gradually depleted.
... my work was very well arranged, but on the other hand, it was very difficult, requiring great patience, knowledge, experience and often great effort.
…
Photographs had to be taken in a variety of and often very difficult conditions, and then in the evening it was necessary to develop the photographs in the carriage laboratory, and sometimes the work was delayed until late at night, especially if the weather was unfavorable and it was necessary to find out whether it would be necessary to repeat the shooting in a different light. before leaving for the next destination. Then, copies were made from the negatives on the way and included in the albums.

Steam locomotive with Schmidt superheater, 1910.
A steam locomotive with a compound steam engine and a Schmidt superheater is shown on the railroad between Perm and Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains region of eastern European Russia. The car in the background is believed to be Prokudin-Gorsky's mobile photographic laboratory.

Nilo-Stolobenskaya desert on Lake Seliger. 1910

In 1909-1916, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled a significant part of Russia, photographing ancient temples, monasteries, factories, views of cities and various everyday scenes.
In March 1910, the first presentation to the tsar of photographs of the waterway of the Mariinsky Canal and the industrial Urals, taken by Prokudin-Gorsky. In 1910-1912, as part of a planned photographic expedition along the Kama-Tobolsk waterway, Prokudin made a long journey through the Urals.

Three generations, 1910.
A.P. Kalganov poses with his son and granddaughter for a portrait in the industrial city of Zlatoust in the Ural mountain region of Russia. The son and granddaughter work in the Zlatoust arms factory, which has been the main supplier of weapons to the Russian army since the early 1800s. Kalganov displays traditional Russian dress and beard style, while the two younger generations have a more Western-oriented, modern dress and hair style.

In January 1911, he gave a lecture at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg "Sights along the Mariinsky waterway and the Upper Volga, and a few words about the importance of color photography." In 1911, Prokudin-Gorsky twice made photographic expeditions to Turkestan, photographed monuments in the Yaroslavl and Vladimir provinces.

Iconostasis Orthodox Church in Smolensk. 1912

In 1911-1912, to celebrate the centenary of victory in the Patriotic War of 1812, Prokudin-Gorsky photographed places associated with the Napoleonic campaign in Russia.

1911. Monument on the Raevsky redoubt

1911. Iconostasis in Borodino Church

1911. Icon of Smolensk Mother of God, owned by Bagration

1911. In the Borodino Museum

In 1912, Prokudin-Gorsky photographed the Kama-Tobolsk waterway and the Oka. In the same year, official support for the Prokudin-Gorsky project on a photo review of Russia ended. In 1913-1914, Prokudin-Gorsky participated in the creation of the Biochrom joint stock company, which, among other things, offered color photography services and printing black-and-white and color photographs.

Construction of a gateway near the village of Kuzminsky

In subsequent years, in Samarkand, Prokudin-Gorsky tested a movie camera invented by him for color filming. However, the quality of the film was unsatisfactory. With the outbreak of World War I, Prokudin-Gorsky created a photographic chronicle of military operations, but was subsequently forced to abandon further photographic experiments and began censoring cinematographic tapes arriving from abroad, analyzing photographic preparations and training aircraft crews in aerial photography.

In the summer of 1916, Prokudin-Gorsky made his last photo expedition - he photographed the newly built southern section of the Murmansk railway and the Solovetsky Islands. Official support for the Prokudin-Gorsky photo survey project of Russia has temporarily resumed.

Shortly after the October Revolution of 1917, Prokudin-Gorsky participated in the creation of the Higher Institute of Photography and Photographic Technology (VIFF), which was officially established by a decree of September 9, 1918, after Prokudin-Gorsky's departure abroad. IN last time his collection of photographs was shown in Russia on 19 March 1918 at the Winter Palace.

In 1920-1922, Prokudin-Gorsky wrote a series of articles for the British Journal of Photography and received a patent for a "color cinematography camera". Having moved to Nice in 1922, Prokudin-Gorsky worked with the Lumiere brothers.
Until the mid-1930s, the photographer was engaged in educational activities in France and was even going to make new series photos artistic monuments France and its colonies. This idea was partially realized by his son Mikhail Prokudin-Gorsky.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky died in Paris a few weeks after the liberation of the city from the Germans by the Allied forces. Buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois

Prokudin-Gorsky method

For those who are interested in photography: at the beginning of the 20th century, multilayer color photographic materials did not yet exist, so Prokudin-Gorsky used black-and-white photographic plates (which he sensitized according to his own recipes) and a camera of his own design (its exact device is unknown; it probably looked like on the camera system of the German chemist A. Mite). Through color filters of blue, green and red, three quick shots of the same scene were taken in succession, after which three black-and-white negatives were obtained, one above the other on one photographic plate. The pictures were taken not on three different plates, but on one, in a vertical position, which made it possible to speed up the shooting process by only shifting the plate.
From this triple negative, a triple positive was made (probably by contact printing). To view such photographs, a projector with three lenses located in front of three frames on a photographic plate was used. Each frame was projected through a filter of the same color as the one through which it was shot. When three images (red, green and blue) were added together, a full-color image was obtained on the screen.
The composition of the new sensitizer patented by Prokudin-Gorsky made the silver bromide plate equally sensitive to the entire color spectrum. Peterburgskaya Gazeta reported in December 1906 that, by improving the sensitivity of his plates, the researcher intended to demonstrate "snapshots in natural colors, which is a great success, since no one has received it yet." Perhaps the projections of Prokudin-Gorsky's photograph were the world's first slide demonstrations.
Prokudin-Gorsky contributed to two areas of improvement in color photography that existed at that time: reducing shutter speed (according to his method, Prokudin-Gorsky managed to make exposure in a second possible) and, secondly, increasing the possibility of replicating the image. He presented his ideas at international congresses on applied chemistry.

There was also a method by which the image from photographic plates could be obtained on paper. Until 1917, more than a hundred color photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky were printed in Russia, of which 94 were in the form of photo postcards, and a significant number in books and brochures. Thus, in the book by P. G. Vasenko “The Romanov Boyars and the Accession of Mikhail Fedorovich to the Tsardom” (St. Petersburg, 1913), 22 high-quality color reproductions of photographs by Prokudin-Gorsky were printed, including photographs taken in Moscow. By 1913, the technology made it possible to print color photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky in almost modern quality (see "Russian folk art at the Second All-Russian handicraft exhibition in Petrograd in 1913" - Pg., 1914). Some color photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky were published in a large format in the form of "wall paintings" (for example, a portrait of L. Tolstoy). The exact number of color photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky printed in Russia before 1917 remains unknown.

The fate of the Prokudin-Gorsky collection

It should be noted that Prokudin-Gorsky was not the only one who took color photographs in Russia before 1917. However, only he used the color separation method (the method of Adolf Mite). Other photographers did color photography using a completely different technology, namely, the autochrome method (for example, Professor Ermilov N. E., General Vishnyakov, photographer Steinberg, Petrov, Trapani). This method was easier to use, but produced a rather grainy image that faded quickly. In addition, only the Prokudin-Gorsky collection was made (and preserved) in such a significant volume.

The surviving part of Prokudin-Gorsky's collection of photographs was bought from his heirs in 1948 by the US Library of Congress and for a long time (until 1980) remained unknown to the general public.
In 2000 JJT under contract with the US Library of Congress scanned all 1902 glass negatives from the Prokudin-Gorsky collection. The scan was performed in grayscale with 16-bit color depth and over 1000 dpi resolution. The scanned image files are about 70 MB in size!
All of these files are hosted on the Library of Congress server and are freely available. Scanned images are inverted (digitally converted to positives).

In 2001, the Library of Congress opened the exhibition The Empire That Was Russia. For her, 122 photographs were selected and color images were restored using a computer. When photographing according to the Prokudin-Gorsky method, individual pictures were taken not simultaneously, but with a certain interval of time. As a result, moving objects: flowing water, clouds moving across the sky, smoke, swaying tree branches, movements of faces and figures of people in the frame, etc., were reproduced in photographs with distortions, in the form of displaced multi-colored contours. These distortions are extremely difficult to correct manually. In 2004, Blaise Agvera and Arkas were contracted by the Library of Congress to develop tools for removing artifacts caused by moving objects during the survey.
In total, the "American" (that is, stored in the US Library of Congress) part of the Prokudin-Gorsky collection includes 1902 triple negatives and 2448 black-and-white prints in control albums (in total - about 2600 original images). Work on combining scanned triple negatives and restoration of color digital images obtained in this way continues to this day. For each of the negatives, the following digital files are available: one of three black-and-white frames of a photographic plate (about 10 MB in size); whole photographic plate (size about 70 MB); a color image of a rough alignment, without accurate details over the entire area (about 40 MB in size). For some of the negatives, color images with reduced details were also prepared (file size about 25 MB). For all these images, reduced resolution files of 50-200 KB are available for quick access for informational purposes. In addition, the site contains scans of the pages of Prokudin-Gorsky's control albums and high-resolution scans of those photographs from these albums for which there are no glass negatives. All listed files are available to everyone on the website of the US Library of Congress.

After appearing in free access on the site of the Library of Congress scanned photographic plates of Prokudin-Gorsky in Russia appeared People's Project restoration of the legacy of Prokudin-Gorsky.
In 2007, within the framework of the project "The Russian Empire in Color" of the Publishing House of the Belarusian Exarchate, a special algorithm and program were developed for combining three-component photographs by S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky. This made it possible to combine all the pictures and put them on public display on the Russian Empire in Color website.

Of course, it was especially interesting for me to look at Ryazan. :)

1912. Assumption Cathedral from the east.

1912. Detail of the wall of the Assumption Cathedral.

1912. Entrance to the Assumption Cathedral.

1912. In the Kremlin: Cathedral of the Nativity, Assumption Cathedral (from the west) and the bell tower.

1912. The Trubezh River and the Cathedral of the Nativity of Christ.

1912. Spassky Monastery from the northwest.

1912. Church in the name of the Archangel Michael, the former Grand Duke, next to the Assumption Cathedral.

1912. Bishop's house.

Church of Boris and Gleb, view from the southeast.

1912. General view of Ryazan from the north.

1912. General view of Ryazan from the bell tower of the Assumption Cathedral from the northwest.

1912. View of Ryazan from the southeast.

Zaraisky district of the Ryazan province.