Russian empire unveiled

[Azat]

Includes some Armenian Photos.

 

 

A unique colour photographic record of Russian on the eve of the 1917 revolution has gone on display at the Library of Congress in Washington.

They were taken by the pioneering photographer Sergei Mikhailovic Prokudin-Gorskii between 1907 and 1915 and have been made vivid by a new digital process.

 

A photograph of the elderly novelist Leo Tolstoy by Prokudin-Gorskii caught the attention of Tsar Nicholas II, himself an amateur photographer.

 

With a commission to portray the Russian empire in all its vastness and diversity, and access to previously restricted areas, Prokudin-Gorskii set off on a tour that took him from the Arctic to the Chinese border.

 

The images, originally collected as Photographs for the Tsar, range from castles and cathedrals to the industrial infrastructure of railways and factories. He also captured dramatic landscapes and some of the country's diverse ethnic groups.

 

Pioneering technique

 

A railway carriage was converted to provide a darkroom and laboratory.

 

He also constructed his own camera which quickly snapped the same scene through red, green and then blue filters onto a single glass plate.

 

The Library of Congress bought 1,800 negatives and 12 index volumes of contact prints in 1948 for $4,000.

 

Using the original glass plates and a new technique called digichromatography, the Library of Congress has recreated 58 of the images as they might have looked almost a century ago.

 

The exhibition, "The Empire that was Russia" is on display until 11 August.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/eur...000/1282972.stm