Archived amid Prokudin-Gorsky’s vast photographic survey of the Russian Empire, we find images shot through with starshatter cracks, blebbed with mildew, and blurred by motion. Within such moments of unmaking, Erica X Eisen uncovers the overlapping forces at play behind these pioneering efforts in colour photography.
“At 9
[PM]”, Tsar Nicholas II recorded in his diary on January 22, 1911,
“Prokudin-Gorsky showed us his beautiful color photos of the Volga and the
Urals in the Semi-circular Hall. Dmitri and I played billiards.” As well as
telegraphing a certain princely boredom, the entry is testament to a striking
early achievement in the history of photography: the work of Sergei
Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, an academic and scientist from Murom whose
research interests had come to focus on photochemistry. At a time when
black-and-white was still the dominant photographic mode, Prokudin-Gorsky had
perfected a technique of capturing scenes in full color, so that he could
dazzle audiences in St. Petersburg with magic lantern shows that looked to be
brimming with life: plates of ruby-red berries, lush greenhouses, scale-like
church roofs radiant in the sun.
As the
editor and publisher of the prominent photography magazine Fotograf-Lyubitel,
Prokudin-Gorsky had used his position not only to report on advances in color
photography but also to illustrate these discussions with select reproductions
of his own images, establishing him as a leader in the field and garnering
widespread public notice for his portraits of Tolstoy. The wave of fame these
photos brought him culminated in a 1909 invitation to the Romanovs’ summer
residence at Tsarskoe Selo, where he gave the imperial family a private
demonstration of his work. On the strength of that original presentation,
Nicholas granted the photographer virtual carte blanche to pursue his dream of
documenting the empire via 10,000 images in full color, allowing him access to
areas that would otherwise have been off-limits and even outfitting the
expedition with a special train-car-turned-dark-room.
Drawing
upon the work of James Clerk Maxwell, Adolf Miethe, and others, Prokudin-Gorsky
honed a technique that mimicked how the human eye processes light by dividing
it into three discrete channels. With the aid of special triple-wide glass
plates, the photographer would capture each scene three times over — first
through a blue filter, then a green one, and lastly a red one. The positive
images, when projected using these same filters, could then be recombined and
overlayed to produce a gem-bright composite. In its elaborate three-shot,
three-filter requirements, the technique differed from other early color
photographic technologies, notably the Lumière Brothers’ potato-starch-based
Autochrome, which the professor considered “complex and capricious” and
discarded in favor of his own methods.
The most
well-known of Prokudin-Gorsky’s works possess both a vitality and the peculiar
bittersweetness that comes from seeing a world lost to the past: boys studying
at a school in Bukhara’s Jewish community, now largely dispersed through
emigration; nomadic pastoralists in Central Asia whose traditional way of life
would soon be radically altered by forced settlement and collectivization. But
there is something equally arresting about those lesser-seen works among
Prokudin-Gorsky’s œuvre, photographs that their maker might well have
understood in some sense as “failures”: warped images, off images, images shot
through with starshatter cracks where the plate was smashed, blebbed with mold
and mildew, scratched with a fingernail, or caked in dust. Here our focus
strays away from elegant landscapes and fantastical Orthodox church domes and
toward the great effort involved in staging and producing the photographs
themselves.
The phrase
“true color” occurs a number of times across Prokudin-Gorsky’s surviving
writings. To him, this was his œuvre’s chief virtue, the quality that set it
apart from both black-and-white photography and other forms of art. “These
images are everlasting—they do not change”, he wrote in a letter attempting to
convince Tolstoy to sit for him. “No painted reproduction can achieve such
results.”5 Projected for audiences across Europe — the most common way
Prokudin-Gorsky’s works were seen by the public during his lifetime — his
photographs were met with wonder and rapturous praise: a record of one such
display for a group of specialists reports “lengthy unceasing applause and
shouts of approbation among those present”.
Yet the photographer’s claims of “true color” elide the degree to which, by virtue of his particular technique, many aspects of the final images are ultimately open to choice, in the way that an adagio may sound crisp or contemplative depending on the orchestra interpreting it. The photographs printed during Prokudin-Gorsky’s lifetime, for instance, were rendered in considerably more muted tones than the bright hues in which they are typically shown today. The prints and digital images familiar to modern viewers are themselves the product of painstaking efforts by various parties in recent years to overlay the photographer’s triplicate filtered negatives to create a single unified scene. Done manually, proper matching of a single image can take hours, a process that has been sped up somewhat by the advent of new digital tools. But no matter the technology at one’s disposal, harmonizing the three color-filtered exposures is tricky, not least because both the subject and the camera may have shifted between the first and third shutter release. For those attempting to align the resultant staggered negatives, these disjunctures present a quandary: which is the “true” photo, the composition with which the other two negatives must be made to conform?
Of the
several efforts that have been made to tackle this challenge, two prominent
ones have come out of the Library of Congress. The institution has housed all
known surviving negatives of Prokudin-Gorsky’s work since 1948, when the
library purchased and removed the collection from the cramped Paris basement
where it had been kept following the family’s departure from Russia. The hand
of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who produced a set of color composites for the LOC in
2004, is instantly recognizable by the thick bands of color that form a kind of
ersatz frame around each image: smooth gradations fraying into discrete strands
of red, blue, and green. Walt Frankhauser, who began work on the collection in
the 1990s, chose to draw out more brightness and contrast in his renditions.
When surveying several versions of the same shot, the certainty of
Prokudin-Gorsky’s “true colors” soon becomes nebulous and difficult to pin
down.
The photographer must have been acutely aware of the difficulties his technique posed when it came to overlaying three negatives to create a crisp scene. He generally avoided photographing anything that might move when working indoors, where low light levels required a single exposure to drag out for ten minutes or more. Instead, viewers are treated to a series of still and dead subjects: wooden saints, elaborately costumed mannequins, and taxidermied animals whose rictus snarls were guaranteed to hold from shot to shot.
The bright
light of the outdoor sun shaved down exposure times considerably, and it was
here that Prokudin-Gorsky attempted to capture scenes of life. But even if he
worked at top speed, there was always the risk that a sudden stray movement
would create what Agüera calls “ghosting”— a candy-colored blur where a solid
form should be. A Turkmen camel shakes its head pinkly; the breeze splays a
carpet across the visible light spectrum; a baby pops in and out of existence
between takes. Certain subject matter presented further challenges to the
professor’s method. Rivers proved difficult: at Five Brothers Rock, the
swift-flowing Chusovaya runs red, while in a shot of Girvas Waterfall, the
rapids are alive with flashes of strange rainbow light. Clouds and smoke are
similarly transformed into sweet blurs as they move across the sky. While
Prokudin-Gorsky may well have understood these difficulties as faults of his
technique, they constitute a fundamental part of its charm: documentary
fidelity tips into something imperfect, enchanted, and alive.
Then there
are those photographs in Prokudin-Gorsky’s collection that were affected not by
a chance occurrence while they were taken but by an accident in the century
since. Over the intervening decades, negatives have shattered or become
breeding grounds for fungi; scenes once clear have grown faded and patchy as
their emulsion has broken down. The names bestowed upon these imperfections by
conservators sometimes possess a startling poetic quality: “butterfly wing”,
“fern life”, “frost on a windowpane”. Frankhauser, who produced digital
renderings for roughly 1,400 of the LOC’s 1,902 negatives and generally favored
greater intervention to sharpen his pictures, reached the conclusion that
“unfortunately, some images simply could not be processed”. But Agüera’s
digitization effort, which tackled the Prokudin-Gorsky collection in its
entirety, gives us a sense of how even these extremely damaged pieces could
look. In one photo, color defects turn a Danube landscape into Rothko-esque
planes of pure color; in another, a wedge of unalloyed pink slices through an
otherwise bucolic scene of peasants lunching in a hayfield. River views break
out in pox, ferns emerge through the snow of mountains in Uzbekistan, and a
blue fingerprint smudges the foreground of a shot across the Kem. It is
precisely where the image is unmade — colors bleeding together, coming apart —
that we get a sense of how it was created in the first place.
If
Prokudin-Gorsky felt that the great strength of his photographs was their
fidelity to nature, he was also quite clear about the effect he hoped they
would work upon the viewer. Seeing the breadth and beauty of the country, he
wrote in notes to a lecture for his fellow Russian émigrés in Paris in the
1930s, was “the only way to show and to prove to Russian youth, who have
already forgotten or who have generally never seen their motherland, the full
power, full significance, full greatness of Russia and in this way awaken that national
awareness that is so necessary”. Even before the Russian Revolution, which
precipitated the photographer’s departure for the West, a nationalistic and
imperialistic bent is clear in his work. Prokudin-Gorsky’s surviving writings
are dotted with assessments of Russian advancement in photographic technology
that explicitly measure his home country against Europe, comparisons that evoke
a long history of anxieties about Russia’s status vis-à-vis the West. In this
context, significantly, imperial possessions were often used as barometers of
Europeanness, a sentiment perhaps most infamously contested in a quotation from
a newspaper column by none other than Fyodor Dostoevsky celebrating tsarist
conquests in Turkestan: “This shame that Europe will consider us Asians has
been hanging over us for almost two centuries now…. With our push toward Asia
we will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength.”
In this
respect, it’s significant that Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographic survey completely
eschewed Russia’s principal cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg in favor of
forays into the imperial periphery. The 1905 public demonstration mentioned
above, which won the photographer “lengthy unceasing applause and shouts of
approbation”, focused on views of Finland, Dagestan, and the Caucasus —
conquered territories populated by peoples whose ethnic backgrounds, languages,
and religions differed from those of many metropolitan viewers. Likewise, his
celebration of railroad technology — a prominent staple of his albums and the
mode of transit that made possible their very creation — obscures the fact that
these and other imperial infrastructure projects were often built by forced
laborers. Some of Prokudin-Gorsky’s most frequently reproduced photographs come
from colonial Turkestan, where visions of broad, unpeopled landscapes and
deteriorating Timurid mosques with no one there to maintain them — images whose
lack of living subjects was likely at least in part dictated by the limitations
of his three-color technique — suggest empty terrain ripe for the taking by
Russian settlers. Among his less picturesque views of the region, we find a
series of photographs of factories and machines used to process cotton — a boon
for the imperial economy whose cultivation was a major driver of Russian
settlement in colonial Central Asia.
If
photographic archives like Prokudin-Gorsky’s are indices and tools of empire,
what happens when the images they contain are broken? It’s tempting to read
into the collection’s imperfections, as if a negative’s flaws might reveal the
instability of the powers that created it, the lie beneath all claims of “true
color”. Like the Central Asian nomads and migrants whose movements constantly
frustrated Russian colonial authorities’ attempts to pin them down under the
border regime, Prokudin-Gorsky’s framing of the world required a deathly
stillness that never comported with reality. Should something move, should the
wind blow too forcefully, or should anything happen to the delicate glass slide
once the photograph was taken — then only ghosts would remain.
In Search
of True Color : Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s
Flawed Images. By Erica X Eisen. The Public Domain Review, December 7, 2022
In the decade or so before the revolutions of 1917, the photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky crisscrossed the Russian empire on its growing network of railways. He visited the medieval towns of Yaroslavl and Smolensk, went deep into Siberia and north to the Solovetsky islands, and travelled south to Bukhara and Samarkand, Central Asian cities colonised over the preceding century. He photographed churches and monasteries, factories and waterways, landscapes and natural wonders, famous people (Tolstoy, the emir of Bukhara), peasant girls and factory workers. He travelled in style, with his own carriage, half of which contained his bespoke darkroom. The Ministry of Transport did its best to accommodate the unusual traveller and his considerable baggage. He was, after all, a man of importance: Tsar Nicholas II had received him personally in 1909 and requested more of his striking colour images. But Prokudin-Gorsky also had a wider audience in mind. His goal was to reveal the diversity and richness of the empire to audiences in St Petersburg and Moscow. With that aim, he put together a series of colour postcards for sale and gave frequent slide demonstrations to the public.
In 1970, an
American graduate student set off for what was then the Soviet Union, taking a
camera he’d bought for the trip. William Craft Brumfield spent the next
half-century travelling through the Soviet Union and its successor states,
becoming a specialist in the region’s architectural history and a respected
photographer in his own right. Along the way, he developed an interest in the
work of Prokudin-Gorsky. He visited and photographed many of the same sites,
and in Journeys through the Russian Empire he brings the two collections
together. The juxtaposition of the newer photograph with the old, often taken
from the same angle, captures the twilight, and in one case the aftermath, of
two empires – the Romanov dynasty and the USSR.
Rather than
attempt an overview of the entire Prokudin-Gorsky collection, Brumfield
concentrates on religious buildings. His selection includes Prokudin-Gorsky’s
portraits of individual churches and monasteries, and – in one chapter –
mosques and madrasas. He also includes a striking urban panorama of the
Siberian city of Perm, taken in 1909, with its cathedral, mosque, railway
bridge, foundries billowing smoke, steamers and barges on the Kama river. This
is a city undergoing rapid industrialisation, a dynamism caught in the smoke
moving across the skyline.
For the
most part, however, Prokudin-Gorsky’s pictures have a static quality. The
process he used to produce colour photographs required a relatively long
exposure, making it impossible to capture the bustle of a city scene. His
pictures of religious buildings were shot at quiet times: in the market town of
Borisoglebsky, for example, he photographed the Rostov monastery before the
market stalls had been set up. Without people or movement, these pictures seem
timeless. Although in other photographs Prokudin-Gorsky sought to capture some
of the great transformations underway in the early 20th century – new railways
and waterways – his depictions of churches and monasteries, often set against a
rural backdrop, suggest an unchanging country. The vividness of the colour
images, and the nostalgia of their composition, explains the interest
Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs have attracted in recent decades, as Russians
look for alternatives to the Soviet legacy.
What
happened to this pre-Soviet heritage in the decades after 1917? Is this really
a Russia that was ‘lost’? On first viewing, the two journeys presented in this
collection suggest not. Brumfield was able to re-create set pieces that
differed little from those of his predecessor: the same church still stands,
sometimes crumbling or missing parts, sometimes restored, but always
recognisable. Photographs of the town of Suzdal, taken almost a century apart,
show few signs of change: green fields and low wooden houses still surround the
Intercession Convent, with no evidence of a Soviet imprint. The new industrial
centre of Yaroslavl was built to the west of the old city, so the religious
buildings photographed by Brumfield are still bordered by the trees we see in
Prokudin-Gorsky’s images. There are exceptions: Brumfield’s shots of
Yekaterinburg show a city transformed, the Cathedral of Saint Catherine
destroyed and the district court overshadowed by Soviet blocks and post-Soviet
skyscrapers.
The
impression that Russia emerged largely unscathed and unchanged from the Soviet
years feels wrong, of course. The revolution was meant to bring a grand
transformation of every aspect of contemporary life, one that could only be
achieved by destroying the old. Religion – its practices, places and people –
was certainly part of the ‘old’ world. The most famous church to be destroyed
was the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Built to celebrate the
retreat of Napoleon in 1812, it was dynamited in 1931. Stalin intended a great
new Palace of the Soviets to replace it. A national competition was launched to
find a design but the project was eventually shelved in favour of an enormous
public swimming pool: a holy site made into a palace of leisure for the masses.
Prokudin-Gorsky chose not to photograph either St Petersburg or Moscow, so the
church doesn’t feature in this book, and as a result the pairs of images, all
of provincial outposts, seem to tell a story of continuity rather than rupture.
Yet once you get past the often striking similarities between the two sets, a
more complex story emerges. In the Soviet era, religious buildings faced many
possible fates. There were certainly episodes of violent destruction, but also
of neglect, reappropriation and restoration, and these phases overlapped and
intertwined, reflecting an attitude to religion and its heritage that was above
all inconsistent.
The
anti-religious struggle began during the Revolution and the Civil War, when the
Bolsheviks targeted the wealth and infrastructure of organised religion,
especially the Russian Orthodox Church. The year 1929 is often referred to as
the ‘great breakthrough’ because of its breathtaking targets for industrial
output and collectivisation, but it also saw the intensification of the state’s
anti-religious measures. In the Russian republic, a quarter of Orthodox
churches were closed in just two years. The onion domes of the Cathedral of the
Deposition in Suzdal, which Prokudin-Gorsky photographed in 1912, were
destroyed in 1929 when the building was converted into a power station,
supplying electricity to a nearby prison. The baroque Cathedral of Saint
Catherine in Yekaterinburg was demolished in 1930. Such iconoclastic acts were
typical of those years. Sometimes churches were dismantled more stealthily. At
Borodino – where Napoleon was pushed back in 1812 – much of the village was
burned to the ground when the German army retreated in 1942. The church’s bell
tower survived, but was taken apart piece by piece by the chairman of a local
collective farm, who was desperate for bricks to use in postwar reconstruction.
The ruin of churches could also be a form of collateral damage. In 1961, the
village of Krokhino was flooded when a new reservoir was created. Left standing
precariously on the water’s edge, the Church of the Nativity of Christ
gradually collapsed. The most common fate was for places of worship to be
stripped of their valuables and put to other uses. Monasteries and churches
became prisons, old people’s homes and warehouses. The mosque in Perm was used
to house the local Communist Party archive. In the town of Vytegra, the
cathedral lost its bell tower and cupolas, gained larger windows and became the
local club, where meetings, social events and film screenings were held.
Interestingly, as the historian Catriona Kelly has noted, church buildings in
the USSR were never appropriated for housing, though this has been happening in
Western Europe since the 1960s. What Kelly called a ‘sense of the sacral’ seems
to have remained.
Conflicting impulses were at work. Buildings were required to house prisoners, or grain; bricks were needed for new structures; gold was taken from cupolas to boost the state coffers. There were political aims too. Destroying or disfiguring sites of worship demonstrated not only their obsolescence, but also the power of communism to bring about transformation. Once the violence ended, the preferred narrative of the Soviet authorities – that of overturning the Church’s tyranny – risked being forgotten. At the height of Stalin’s cultural revolution, the destruction of churches, including Christ the Saviour, was captured on film in a bid to preserve the moment.
An alternative
to destruction – which was costly and time-consuming – was to preserve
religious buildings but change their meaning, flip them from places of worship
into sites of atheist learning. Museums of atheism were opened in former
churches and mosques from the 1920s onwards, but especially in the Khrushchev
era, which saw the launch of new offensives against religious activity.
Displays showed visitors scenes of the misery inflicted throughout history in
the name of religion. At the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg, Roman
Catholicism was represented by a diorama depicting a medieval torture chamber
with a prisoner on a rack. Religion became a closed chapter in human history, a
horror to be gawped at, a barbarism unimaginable in the present day. In this manner,
the heuristic function of the building’s desacralisation was re-enacted each
time a school group or coach of tourists visited. But attitudes to religion
continued to shift, and by the 1980s, many displays were being reworked to give
a rosier view of Russia’s religious past.
In fact, as
Journeys through the Russian Empire quietly illustrates, the desire to preserve
religious buildings as part of a national past was not solely a phenomenon of
perestroika. Preservationists were active throughout the Soviet period, and
even if their efforts were sometimes overwhelmed by waves of violent
anti-religious activity, the idea that religious buildings had an intrinsic
cultural and aesthetic value never entirely went away. Local efforts to
preserve these buildings were often successful. The chairman of the collective
farm at Borodino was eventually forced to stop pilfering bricks from the church
by historians and preservationists. In the 1960s, the film director and actor
Sergei Bondarchuk was instrumental in campaigning for the restoration of the
church’s exterior, including its bell tower, which featured in his movie
version of War and Peace. Several of the religious buildings photographed by
Brumfield were restored while Khrushchev and Brezhnev were in power: in the
1950s, the Nativity Cathedral in Suzdal; in the 1960s, the Church of St Peter
and St Paul in Smolensk and the Transfiguration Monastery on Solovetsky Island,
as well as other buildings in Suzdal after the town was made a national
cultural landmark in 1967; in the 1970s, the Archangel Cathedral in Ryazan; and
so on. The desire to preserve a national past was felt beyond Russia, too. In
Central Asia committees were formed in the 1920s to preserve historic
buildings, including madrasas, and although preservation work faltered in the
1930s, new initiatives were launched in the 1950s, with work beginning in
earnest in the early 1960s. The Miri Arab Madrasa in Bukhara and the Gur Emir
in Samarkand (the burial place of Tamerlane) – shown in the penultimate chapter
of Journeys through the Russian Empire – both underwent extensive restoration
during the Soviet era.
This is all quite different from the story of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, which seems to follow the arc of communism’s rise and fall. When Soviet power ended, the cathedral was rapidly rebuilt, once more serving the religious needs of the capital’s political and cultural elite. As such it also became a site for protest – Pussy Riot staged a guerrilla performance of their ‘Punk Prayer’ here in 2012. Yet the fate of the religious buildings surveyed in Journeys through the Russian Empire shows that the pattern of church destruction in the Stalin era and recovery after the fall of communism was not universal. The question of what to do with religious buildings was unresolved throughout the Soviet era. Blowing them up was appealing to the Bolsheviks, but so was protecting them as symbols of national heritage and pride; or preserving them while transforming their use and meaning, turning them into props for the story of communism’s secular triumph – a fragile narrative that had to be constantly retold. Contemporary Russia may like to see itself as the saviour of a religious tradition all but obliterated by the communists, but this too is a fragile narrative. The traces that survive suggest a less straightforward history.
Journeys
through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky by
William Craft Brumfield. Duke, 518 pp., £43, May 2020, 978 1 4780 0602 2
How to Flip a Church. By Miriam Dobson. London Review of Books, February 18, 2021
Photography, since its inception, has provided an invaluable window into Russia’s turbulent past. The revolutions of 1917 irrevocably altered the course of Russia’s history with seismic political change, but also rendered an entire way of life not only obsolete but also taboo. Historians were left to pore over sepia-toned photos to piece together the vanished and vanquished world of imperial Russia.
How
fortunate we are, therefore, that much of the pioneering color photography of
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944), who documented the Russian Empire in its
waning decades, has survived for posterity. In his latest authoritative book,
“Journeys Through the Russian Empire,” (Duke University Press, 2020) Russian
scholar, photographer, and chronicler of Russian architecture William Craft
Brumfield frames the life and work of Prokudin-Gorsky. He also puts his own
magisterial career into sharp perspective with his own late 20th and early
21st-century photographs taken of some of the same subjects. The result is an
extraordinary study of two photographers and, indeed, two Russias.
Prokudin-Gorsky
was a creature of his expansive and creative era. This polymath, inventor,
explorer, entrepreneur, and photographer was a scion of Russia’s provincial
nobility. He received an excellent education in St. Petersburg that focused on
both science and the arts, perfectly positioning him to pursue his passion for
the emerging technology of photography. Prokudin-Gorsky felt strongly that
photography demanded a full understanding of the science behind the technology,
but he also understood its inevitable march towards main-stream use by
amateurs; his ability to make peace with these competing notions was one of his
greatest strengths, and a strong entrepreneurial streak enabled him to harness
the economic potential of the emerging phenomenon in a ground-breaking career.
Prokudin-Gorsky studied in St. Petersburg, graduating in 1889 from the faculty of Natural Sciences, after which he traveled to both Berlin and Paris to work with leading chemists and photographers. From the beginning of his professional life, he pursued his goal to produce color photography, but throughout his career, he was a vocal champion for his colleagues, assuming the editorship of Russia’s “Amateur Photography” and campaigning successfully for photographers to assert ownership of their work.
The scope
of Prokudin-Gorsky’s ambitions matched the size of the Russian empire he sought
to capture and preserve with his new color technology: a daunting one fifth of
the world’s land mass with a Byzantine imperial bureaucracy that hindered
access to many of the empire’s more picturesque corners and subjects.
Fortunately for Prokudin-Gorsky, in 1909 his work came to the attention of the
imperial family — passionate shutterbugs themselves — and after successful
presentations of his color slides to the tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Michael and
his mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, Prokudin-Gorsky secured an
invitation to present them to Nicholas II and his family.
Contemporary
sources characterize Nicholas II as a great waffler, but in the matter of
Prokudin-Gorsky’s request for imperial patronage of an ambitious plan to
photograph the Russian empire, the sovereign acted swiftly and remained
steadfast. Nicholas II ordered the minister of ways and communications to
furnish Prokudin-Gorsky with a specially designed Pullman railway car for his
laboratory and access to river transport. The tsar also gave Prokudin-Gorsky an
enviable laissez-passer for the entire empire, and an order that enabled the
photographer to solicit aid from all government officials. For the next six
years, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled throughout the empire on several regional
expeditions, using his color method to document the ministry’s development
projects, particularly the rapidly expanding railroad network that was
fast-forwarding Russia into a powerful industrial nation. But along the way, he
also captured the natural beauty of Russia’s wilder corners: the majestic
Caucasus, the arid desert of Central Asia, and the dense forests of the Urals.
Prokudin-Gorsky’s
innovative color technology involved photographing a subject with three
separate plates. By necessity, his subjects had to be stationary or at least be
willing and able to stand very still. But the resulting images are anything but
static; Prokudin-Gorsky’s show masterful framing and use of perspective in
photographs that pulse with life and color.
It is
unlikely that Prokudin-Gorsky understood that he was documenting a world that
would soon disappear. But disappear it did. In 1918, Prokudin-Gorsky fled
Russia, taking with him thousands of color slides, which he had tried to get
the Stolypin government to purchase in 1910, but they had, as Brumfield notes,
“with myopic parsimoniousness... let the matter die.” After Prokudin-Gorsky’s
death in 1944, the Library of Congress acquired the collection of his
negatives.
Fast
forward half a century, and another photographer and chronicler of Russia’s
rich architectural traditions began to document many of the same locations that
first drew Prokudin-Gorsky. William Craft Brumfield is the foremost Western
expert on Russian architecture and taught at some of the world’s most renowned
centers of Slavic studies, including Harvard, Tulane, and the Pushkin
Institute. In 2019, in recognition of Brumfield’s contribution to Russian
culture, President Putin awarded him with Russia’s highest honor for a
foreigner, the Order of Friendship.
Brumfield is an academic who thrives in the field — his outstanding photography of Russia’s architecture is an invaluable resource to students of Russian art and architecture, as well as the country’s history. He was a natural choice to curate a public exhibition of Prokudin-Gorsky’s collection for the Library of Congress in 1986 and his association with the library and the collection has continued to this day, with “Journeys Through the Russian Empire” as a magnificent culmination of this fruitful collaboration.
“Journeys
Through the Russian Empire” presents a selection of photographs from eight of
Prokudin-Gorsky’s expeditions throughout the Russian Empire, from 1909 to 1916.
Brumfield has cleverly arranged these, not chronologically but in a logarithmic
spiral like that of a nautilus shell, beginning with the oldest Russian
principalities such as Suzdal in the center and expanding ever outwards to the
Volga river lands, the Ural Mountains, Siberia, and Central Asia. The spiral
culminates in a trip to the remote Solovetsky Islands, which in
Prokudin-Gorsky’s day housed a monastery and in Brumfield’s — a decommissioned
Gulag camp. Each chapter showcases selections of Prokudin-Gorsky’s work and
Brumfield’s own photograph of the same subject, often from the same vantage.
Occasionally, the shots are so uncannily similar that one has to refer to the
notes to ascertain which image predates the other.
But in
other evocative pairings we cannot help but note the effects not only of time
but also politics and economics.
Brumfield shows us churches that have repurposed or simply allowed to
decay, but he also shows us more recent attempts to restore and revitalize.
While Prokudin-Gorsky’s photos were taken over only seven years, Brumfield’s
span almost three decades, and in this progression we see the changes in Russia
from the Soviet era through perestroika to the present.
Anyone who
has traveled throughout Russia’s vast regions recalls the staggering beauty of
nature and the magnificence of the architecture, particularly in the more
remote corners of the country. Both Prokudin-Gorsky and Brumfield capture this
richness with images that are so immediate and evocative that one almost feels
the heat of the sun radiating off the stone walls of Registan Square in
Samarkand or catches sound of the Volga River lapping against the shore of tiny
jewel-like Uglich or detects the musty odor of a long-neglected church. “Journeys Through the Russian Empire”
deliberately eschews photos of either Moscow or St. Petersburg, allowing the
quiet majesty of Russia’s often overlooked provinces to take center stage. This
is an excellent decision by Brumfield, reflecting and honoring
Prokudin-Gorsky’s desire to capture the breadth of Russia for the empire’s
citizens.
“Journeys Through the Russian Empire” is a
masterful achievement that readers will want to savor and return to again and
again. In its pages are insightful lessons on everything from color photography
to the nature of time. William Craft Brumfield has brought all of his
considerable talent, expertise, and energy to produce an invaluable resource
for students of Russian history, photography buffs, nature lovers, architecture
aficionados, and anyone who longs to explore the expansive Russian empire
through the eyes of two eminently talented and devoted photographers.
Excerpt
from "Journeys Through the Russian Empire"
Above the
Abyss: A Reflection on Photography as an Instrument of Memory
Time and
memory are two of the broadest categories in human thought, fundamentals of
philosophy, and of thought about thought. Interpretations of Prokudin-Gorsky’s
photographic project—now universally available through the digitization of his
collection at the Library of Congress—have often focused on their technical
brilliance and the nostalgic appeal of a lost world vividly rediscovered in
brilliant color. These photographs transport us back in time and create an
illusion of memory. The images seem so tactile and so close. Such
interpretations and glosses on Prokudin-Gorsky’s work tell us much, but what do
they neglect?
In
Prokudin-Gorsky’s idealistic project, photography, like the railroads that he
rode and documented, served as a means of uniting a vast, culturally diverse
empire through a vision that would enlighten those who saw the images. To
behold the regions of the empire in bright colors would be to comprehend not
only its diversity but also the role the empire played in uniting the peoples
of an immeasurable Eurasian territory. In addition to documenting the medley of
diverse cultures, he also recorded evidence of the empire’s development.
Commissioned to photograph the expansion of Russia’s transportation
network—seen as the engine of economic growth and progress—Prokudin-Gorsky
paradoxically used that network as a means of recovering Russia’s past. Yet his
vibrant images portray an order that would collapse in almost unimaginable
violence within a decade or less of the photographing. It would be unreasonable
to fault Prokudin-Gorsky for lack of foresight, although as a resident of Saint
Petersburg he was aware of the possibility of terror attacks: One of them
killed a potential patron, prime minster Peter Stolypin, in 1911. And when he
photographed Leo Tolstoy at his Yasnaya Polyana estate in 1908, he surely knew
of the great writer’s fulminations against the imperial regime and the Orthodox
Church.
Nonetheless,
with the eventual patronage of Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorsky embarked on a
heroic enterprise to record the empire as none before him had done, an
enterprise that continues to enrich our knowledge and vision decades later. The
question is not what eluded his vision but how do we respond to that vision?
What are the levels on which we can respond? These are by no means simple
questions, and attempts to address them often have an ideological bent. “The
Russia that we have lost”—who are “we” and what was “lost” after 1917?
The answers
could well depend on the specific group considering the question. Among
Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs of splendid Islamic monuments in Bukhara, there
are portraits of haggard prisoners held under barbaric conditions. Some might
argue that these portraits, together with those of ample local potentates, play
into a European, orientalist narrative of Central Asian societies as
semibarbaric. But such an interpretation is out of character for
Prokudin-Gorsky and does not correspond to the direct humanity of his
photographs. In any event few would regret the loss of the Emirate of Bukhara,
a harshly repressive regime that at the time of Prokudin-Gorsky’s visit had the
status of a Russian protectorate. But should we contemplate Prokudin-Gorsky’s
specifically Russian photographs with-out an awareness of the other parts of the
empire that was Russia?
A
contemplation of the Prokudin-Gorsky photographs raises challenging questions
of social and political history. Several of his photographs show Russian
settlers and enterprises in the southern areas of the empire, but to whom had
that land belonged? The perspective that Prokudin-Gorsky implicitly endorses in
his photographs is that of Russians as bringers of progress and amelioration.
This approach became especially pervasive after widespread peasant uprisings in
1905–6 that led to the “Stolypin reforms” of 1906. For the next half decade
Peter Stolypin initiated policies for the re-settlement of hundreds of
thousands of land-poor peasants from the Russian heartland to the empire’s
peripheral areas—a process facilitated by railroad construction.
Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs show evidence of this new Russian presence.
However, it
was one thing when peasants were steered to uninhabited tracts in Siberia, and
another when they were given plots in southern areas (particularly Turkestan)
that were inhabited by non-Russian peoples. Already exposed to wealthy,
extensively irrigated cotton estates (which Prokudin-Gorsky also photographed)
in the Syr-Darya basin, significant elements of the non-Russia population
harbored a festering resentment that contributed to the explosive Central Asian
revolt of 1916. This uprising, exacerbated by wartime conscription of Muslims,
spread through much of Turkestan (including the Samarkand region) in the latter
half of 1916 and led to a staggering carnage that is referred to in
contemporary Kyrgyzstan as “genocide.” Among other victims were Kazakhs and
Russian settlers. The area that Prokudin-Gorsky had calmly photographed five
years earlier was now torn by violence, while the photographer himself was at
the other end of the empire at work on his last Russian expedition, to document
construction of the strategic railroad to the new Arctic port of Murman
(Murmansk). This urgent military project involved the forced labor of Central
Powers prisoners-of-war, whom Prokudin-Gorsky also photographed.
The
preceding comments should persuade us that nostalgic interpretations of
Prokudin-Gorsky’s photography (“the Russia we have lost,” a sense of the lost
idyll) may be superficially appealing, but they ignore a larger, at times
devastating, context. We allow these photographs to transport us to reveries of
the past, yet a knowledge of Russian history compels us to think about the
future (now past) of the subjects portrayed. For example, to look at a group of
children on a White Lake levee in Belozersk is to wonder what became of them in
the next decade, after suffering years of war, social collapse, hunger, and
savage violence. How many of them survived? The church in the background has
long been a ruin, but what happened to the children?
The
appealing, innocent faces of these and other children in Prokudin-Gorsky’s work
remind us of the opening words of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: “The cradle
rocks above the abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a
brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Photography is “light
writing,” and with an awareness of history Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs
illuminate that Nabokovian moment. It might be added that Speak, Memory, first
published as a single volume in 1951, is primarily devoted to a time and milieu
that also nurtured Prokudin-Gorsky and was both forever lost and preserved
through the writer’s memory.
Excerpted
from "Journeys Through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky,” by William Craft Brumfield. Reprinted by permission of
Duke University Press. © 2020 Duke University Press. All rights reserved.
Photographic
'Journeys Through the Russian Empire' : William Craft Brumfield on the
photographic legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. By Jennifer Eremeeva. The MoscowTimes, February 11, 2021.
In honor of the 155th birthday of Russian chemist and photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, Google has designed a special Doodle to celebrate the man's revolutionary work. Here are a few facts about the scientist and his important contribution to the craft of photography.
His
birthday has changed over the years. Prokudin-Gorsky was born in August 1863,
in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow. Because the Russian Empire used a
slightly inaccurate system to count the days of the year borrowed from the
Russian Orthodox Church, Prokudin-Gorsky's birthday was officially recorded on
August 18, according to the Prokudin-Gorsky Project. Russia officially
abandoned the orthodox Julian calendar with the formation of the Soviet Union,
meaning Prokudin-Gorsky's birthday is actually on August 30.
He pioneered modern color photography. After training to become a chemist in Russia, Prokudin-Gorsky moved to Germany, where he met renowned photochemist Adolf Miethe and began studying under him. Building on the three-filter process of Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, who had produced the first color photograph 40 years earlier, Prokudin-Gorsky and his teacher developed a photographic emulsion method that went beyond three-color photography to capture shades of colors in greater detail. The Doodle shows how, by running the same image through three different glass filters, Prokudin-Gorsky could recreate a composite picture of a landscape.
He
photographed Leo Tolstoy. As Prokudin-Gorsky returned to Russia in the early
1900s, he began taking trips through the country, as well as to European
countries such as Austria, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland. He
developed a reputation for his photography and became feted by high society. In
May 1908 he visited the Yasnaya Polyana estate and took the first official
color portrait of the country's most renowned living writer, 80-year-old Leo
Tolstoy.
He toured
Russia in a specialist vehicle, given to him by the tsar. Using what he had
learned abroad, Prokudin-Gorsky undertook a documentary tour of the Russian
Empire between 1909 and 1915. The photographer documented local sites, as well
as the day-to-day rituals and habits of the country's many citizens. In order
for him to be able to work on the go, Prokudin-Gorsky received a railroad car,
outfitted to work as a darkroom for developing photographs, courtesy of Tsar
Nicholas II. The photographer traveled to over 30 regions of the empire,
including parts that today fall in Belarus, Finland and Ukraine.
He wanted
to use cutting-edge photography to educate children. After plying his craft
across Russia and elsewhere, Prokudin-Gorsky had amassed an extensive catalog
of pictures. His idea was to use his "optical color projection" in
the classroom, to teach Russian schoolchildren about the various traditions in
the large empire.
He left
Russia during the civil war, never to return. Sent on assignment to Norway in
1918, Prokudin-Gorsky never made it back to Russia, as his patron, the tsar,
was toppled by revolutionaries and Vladimir Lenin forced the Bolsheviks into
power. Prokudin-Gorsky eventually settled in France, where he died in 1944. His
photographs remain one of the most impressive catalogs of Russia at the turn of
the century, before the rise of the Soviet Union.
Sergey
Prokudin-Gorsky: Facts and Pictures From Pioneering Color Photographer
Celebrated in Google Doodle. By Damien Sharkov. Newsweek, August 30, 2018.
More
information and photographs here : Sergey
Prokudin-Gorsky. Unknown Genius of Colour Photography. Carusel, April 22, 2020
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