Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: Artistic Style & Methods

Prokudin-Gorsky did not use colour film. Each scene was photographed in black and white three times, through red, green and blue filters, and the Library of Congress holds most scenes as a single narrow glass negative, about 24 by 9 centimetres, carrying the three frames side by side - one record for each primary colour. His camera was of his own design and may have resembled a model designed around 1906 by Adolf Miethe, whom he had met in Germany.

To show the pictures in colour he projected the three images together through the same three filters, superimposing them on a screen in his lantern lectures. Because the three frames were not exposed at the same instant, anything that moved between them, such as water, leaves, clouds or a restless sitter, does not line up across the three plates, and in modern composites it shows as fringes of pure red, green or blue. Still subjects such as churches, icons, rock faces and posed sitters come through with startling depth and clarity.

His approach was that of a surveyor with a painter's training. He moved systematically along rivers, canals and railways, recording towns from bell towers, monasteries and their treasuries, factories, dams, locks and bridges, and the people he met, from Bashkir villagers and Dagestani mountain people to railway workers and the Emir of Bukhara. Plates were grouped into albums by route, such as Views along the Mariinskii Canal and river system and Views in the Ural Mountains, survey of industrial area, which still shape the collection today.

The colour images on this site are modern reconstructions. The Library of Congress made digital colour composites from the three-part negatives, aligning the red, green and blue records, and restorers have retouched many of them to remove cracks, misregistration and colour casts. The underlying information, however, is entirely Prokudin-Gorsky's: every hue comes from his own filtered exposures made more than a century ago.