WIRED Staff

Prokudin-Gorski's Color Photographs of Tsarist Russia

The US Library of Congress is hosting The Empire That Was Russia, an exhibit displaying the color photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorski, who traveled Tsarist Russia producing thousands of glass-plate negatives. How’d it work? Prokudin-Gorskii projected the slides through the red, green, and blue filters of a device known as a “magic lantern” which superimposed […]

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The US Library of Congress is hosting The Empire That Was Russia, an exhibit displaying the color photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorski, who traveled Tsarist Russia producing thousands of glass-plate negatives. How'd it work?

Prokudin-Gorskii projected the slides through the red, green, and blue filters of a device known as a "magic lantern" which superimposed the images onto a screen resulting in a full-color picture.

It's amazing to see long dead Russian peasants in traditional garb come to life in color this way. It's so easy to forget that color was not invented by Kodak sometime in the 1930's.

The Empire That Was Russia [Official Site]