The 100 year old genuine colour photographs

Greek women and children harvesting tea in Chakva, Georgia

The images look like a product of period costume and instagram filters. In fact, the photographs were commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II between 1909 and 1915. The Russian chemist Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky travelled the length and width of the largest country int he World, to capture the lives of wealthy people, famous landmarks and ordinary citizens. The images are taken during a period of rapid change in Russian history, the beginning of the Great War which would culminate in a bloody revolution. The pictures document a time before rapid mechanization and industrialization of the industry and agriculture. Prokudin-Gorsky created a record of a record of a fast disappearing world.

The Nilova Monasteyr in 1910, was used in 1927 as an orphanage and concentration camp. 

Prokudin-Gorsky, who had a passion for photography, developed a technique to produce images in colour. The three-color principle involved taking three black and white photos through a red, green and blue filter. The images could then be projected onto a screen or viewed through a chromoscope, a device which contained colored filters, or printed in the complementary colours.
Prokudin-Gorsky aimed to educate russian schoolchildren about the expansive Russian Empire.
His personal inventory is thought to have contained 3,500 negatives, at least half of these were destroyed by the Russian authorities during war time Russia.

A self-portrait of Prokudin-Gorsky 1912

Rural peasant women from the along the Sheksna River

Jewish children with learning with their teacher in Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Three murgan villagers

The Prokudin-Gorsky collectionw as purchased by the Library of Congress of the USA in 1948 for $3,000 to $5,000, which is the equivatent of $50,000 today. One of Prokudin-Gorsky's best known photographs is his portrait of Leo Tolstoy from 1908, which is the only color portait known to exist of the prolific author. The fame from this photo and his images of Russia's nature and monuments brought Prokudin-Gorsky to the Tsar's attention.

Some people maintain this was the first colour photographic portrait in Russian history, the subject is author Leo Tolstoy 1908

Some of the children wouldn't sit still, in this photograph from 1909

Rural peasants taking a break from the harvest by the river, 1909

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