18 rare color photographs of the Russian Empire from over 100 years ago
Russian chemist and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was one of the first to use color photography in the early 20th century in Russia.
In 1907, the photographer decided to systematically document the Russian Empire, and he was given a specially equipped railroad car darkroom by Tsar Nicholas II for the project.
To create his images, he used an oblong glass plate through three different color filters of red, green, and blue, projecting them in slides on top of one another to create a full color image.
Today more than 2,000 of his images are preserved by the Library of Congress. We have put together a collection of some of his most striking images.
Prokudin-Gorskii took this photograph of Emir Said Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, the last emir representative to rule the Emirate of Bukhara in Central Asia, in 1911.
Source: Library of Congress
Here, we get an early 20th-century view of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, which was previously known as Tiflis in Russian. Located on a plain formed by the Kura River, the city was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1801 before becoming the capital of an independent Georgia in 1991.
Source: Library of Congress, World Digital Library
By the time World War I arrived, Russia was in a stage of rapid industrialization. Prokudin-Gorskii was interested in documenting the economic life of the empire, capturing photographs like this one, taken in 1910, of a family mining-operation in the Ural Mountain region.
Source: Library of Congress
And this photograph, taken in 1912, of workers and supervisors preparing to pour cement foundations for a sluice dam across the Oka River, near the town of Denivo.
Source: Library of Congress
Railroad truss bridges, built on columns over the Kama River near Perm, helped support the Trans-Siberian Railway, spanning over 6,000 miles from central European Russia to the Pacific Ocean.
Source: Library of Congress
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