Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii
Here is a man who traveled on a train-car outfitted as a mobile darkroom. Funded by the last tsar of Russia, he was tasked to capture the landscapes and people in newly conquered lands within the expanding empire. He would shoot three black and white negatives consecutively, each with a red, blue, and green filter; then, he would project all three simultaneously with the accompanying colored-gels to reveal a vibrantly colored image. While he did not invent this system, he certainly took a technical process towards a creative zenith. Because he was acting essentially as a colonial subject, this is what fascinates me: no matter who or what he framed, from a bush of poppy flowers or the vistas of forests plundered for lumber, to the quaintly staged outdoor portraits of laboring families or the Caucasus peoples, there is always a subtle delicacy and respect. I’m aware of imposing my own revisionist narrative: a lamentation for the piles of timber in the foreground, the lush woods in the distance, and technicolor smoke rising from blackened chimneys. And then to treat a small vase with wild-flowers with the same endearing wonder as an over-grown path towards a decaying stone church.
all photographs here taken between 1904 and 1915, and restored by Alex Gridenko via digichromatography, more here.