Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky (; – 27 September 1944) was a Russian chemist and photographer. He is best known for his pioneering work in colour photography and his effort to document the early 20th-century Russian Empire.
Using a railway-car darkroom provided by Emperor Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorsky travelled the Russian Empire from around 1909 to 1915 using his three-image colour photography to record its many aspects. While some of his negatives were lost, the majority ended up in the US Library of Congress after his death. Starting in 2000, the negatives were digitised and the colour triples for each subject digitally combined to produce hundreds of high-quality colour images of Russia and its neighbours from over a century ago.
Biography
Early life Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was born in the ancestral estate of Funikova Gora, in the Pokrovsky Uyezd of the Vladimir Governorate (now Kirzhachsky District, Vladimir Oblast). His parents were of the Russian nobility, and the family had a long military history. They moved to Saint Petersburg, where Prokudin-Gorsky enrolled in Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology to study chemistry under Dmitri Mendeleev. He also studied music and painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts.
Marriage and career in photography In 1890, Prokudin-Gorsky married Anna Aleksandrovna Lavrova, and later the couple had two sons, Mikhail and Dmitri, and a daughter, Ekaterina. Anna was the daughter of the Russian industrialist Aleksandr Stepanovich Lavrov, an active member in the Imperial Russian Technical Society (IRTS). Prokudin-Gorsky subsequently became the director of the executive board of Lavrov's metal works near Saint Petersburg and remained so until the October Revolution. He also joined Russia's oldest photographic society, the photography section of the IRTS, presenting papers and lecturing on the science of photography.
In 1901, Prokudin-Gorsky established a photographic studio and laboratory in Saint Petersburg. The following year, he travelled to Berlin and spent 6 weeks studying colour sensitization and three-colour photography with photochemistry professor Adolf Miethe, the most advanced practitioner in Germany at that time.The chronology at Prokudin-Gorsky.org (accessed 26 September 2012) reports six weeks of study with Miethe in 1902. Other accounts give the year as 1889, but a primary source for that extremely early date is not apparent and it does not accord with the circa 1889 biographical details of either man. The major English-language source reporting 1889 (Adamson and Zinkham, p. 108) describes Miethe as "A brilliant young professor at the Charlottenburg Technische Hochschule..." and states (footnote, same page) that "While in Berlin, Prokudin-Gorskii is said to have given technical courses in photochemistry and spectrum analysis at the Technische Hochschule...", which evidences confusion of the facts somewhere along the line: biographies of Miethe all agree that he, not Prokudin-Gorsky, was the professor of photochemistry and spectroanalysis at the Königlich Technische Hochschule in Berlin, a post he accepted by invitation in 1899 after the sudden death (17 December 1898) of its previous longtime occupant, Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, the discoverer of dye sensitization and himself a colour photography experimenter. It was apparently Miethe's first teaching position and the beginning of his involvement with colour photography. Until then he had been employed by optical firms such as Voigtländer but was already a notable author, journal editor and inventor in the field of (black-and-white) photography. Throughout the years, Prokudin-Gorsky's photographic work, publications and slide shows to other scientists and photographers in Russia, Germany and France earned him praise, and in 1906 he was elected the president of the IRTS photography section and editor of Russia's main photography journal, the Fotograf-Liubitel. Gorsky was a member of the Royal Photographic Society between 1920 and 1932.Membership lists of the Royal Photographic Society
Perhaps Prokudin-Gorsky's best-known work during his lifetime was his color portrait of Leo Tolstoy, which was reproduced in various publications, on postcards, and as larger prints for framing. The fame from this photo and his earlier photos of Russia's nature and monuments earned him invitations to show his work to the Russian Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna in 1908, and to Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1909. The Tsar enjoyed the demonstration, and, with his blessing, Prokudin-Gorsky got the permission and funding to document Russia in color. In the course of ten years, he was to make a collection of 10,000 photos. Prokudin-Gorsky considered the project his life's work and continued his photographic journeys through Russia until after the October Revolution. Under the new regime he was forced to accept a professorship and in August 1918 was ordered by the Education Ministry to procure projection equipment in Norway. He still pursued scientific work in color photography, published papers in English photography journals and, together with his colleague , obtained patents in Germany, England, France and Italy.
Later life and death In 1920, Prokudin-Gorsky remarried and had a daughter with his assistant Maria Fedorovna née Schedrina. The family finally settled in Paris in 1922, reuniting with his first wife and children. Prokudin-Gorsky set up a photo studio there together with his three adult children, naming it after his fourth child, Elka. In the 1930s, the elderly Prokudin-Gorsky continued with lectures showing his photographs of Russia to young Russians in France, but stopped commercial work and left the studio to his children, who named it Gorsky Frères. He died in Paris on 27 September 1944, a month after the Liberation of Paris. He is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery.
Photography technique
Three-color principle
The method of color photography used by Prokudin-Gorsky was first suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and demonstrated in 1861, but good results were not possible with the photographic materials available at that time. In imitation of the way a normal human eye senses color, the visible spectrum of colors was divided into three channels of information by capturing it in the form of three black-and-white photographs, one taken through a red filter, one through a green filter, and one through a blue filter. The resulting three photographs could be projected through filters of the same colors and exactly superimposed on a screen, synthesizing the original range of color additively; or viewed as an additive color image by one person at a time through an optical device known generically as a chromoscope or photochromoscope, which contained colored filters and transparent reflectors that visually combined the three into one full-color image; or used to make photographic or mechanical prints in the complementary colors cyan, magenta and yellow, which, when superimposed, reconstituted the color subtractively.Coe, Brian, Colour Photography: The First Hundred Years 1840-1940, Ash & Grant, 1978. Also published in the U.S., this excellent and amply-illustrated overview of the history of color photography before Kodachrome nevertheless, like other books on the subject, includes a few wrong dates and repeats entrenched but demonstrably erroneous conventional wisdom about the color sensitivity of pre-1906 photographic materials.
Early practitioners Louis Ducos du Hauron conducted early experiments with the three-color principle in the late 1860s. During the period from the 1870s to the 1890s, he created several color prints and photographs.
In 1877, Edward Bierstadt showcased the first successful three-color prints in the United States. His work gained attention in the 1890s when he exhibited color prints of various subjects such as oil and watercolor paintings, floral studies, and portraits from life.
The first person to widely demonstrate good results by this method was Frederic E. Ives, whose "Kromskop" system of viewers, projectors and camera equipment was commercially available from 1897 until about 1907. Only the viewers and ready-made triple photographs for use in them sold in any significant quantity. Still life arrangements, unpopulated landscapes and oil paintings were the typical subject matter, but a few examples of color portraiture from life were also offered.
Another very notable practitioner was Adolf Miethe, with whom Prokudin-Gorsky studied in Germany in 1902. Miethe was a photochemist who greatly improved the panchromatic characteristics of the black-and-white photographic materials suitable for use with this method of color photography. He presented projected color photographs to the German Imperial Family in 1902 and was exhibiting them to the general public in 1903, when they also began to appear in periodicals and books. Miethe took the first known aerial color photographs, from a hot air balloon, in 1906.
In England in 1899 Ives's former assistant, Edward Sanger-Shepherd, commercialized the application of the three-colour process in the "Sanger Shepherd process of natural colour photography". With his process in 1903 and 1904 Sarah Angelina Acland produced the first substantial body of work in colour photography by an amateur photographer. By 1905 seventeen different photographers had shown three-colour slides by the Sanger-Shepherd process at exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society in England.
In 1905, the Neue Photographische Gesellschaft established a color photography studio in Berlin. The studio utilized the three-color principle and employed a printing process developed by Robert Krayn. Some of the resulting images were published as postcards, featuring notable individuals including Kaiser Wilhelm II and Pope Pius X.
Equipment
Photographic plates, which had the light-sensitive emulsion coated on a thin sheet of glass, were normally used instead of flexible film, both because a general transition from glass plates to plastic film was still in progress and because glass provided the best dimensional stability for three images intended to match up perfectly when they were later combined.
An ordinary camera could be used to take the three pictures, by reloading it and changing filters between exposures, but pioneering color photographers usually built or bought special cameras that made the procedure less awkward and time-consuming. One of the two main types used beam splitters to produce three separate images in the camera, making all three exposures at the same time and from the same viewpoint. Although a camera of this type was ideal in theory, such cameras were optically complicated and delicate, and liable to get out of adjustment. Some designs were also subject to optical phenomena that could cause noticeably uneven color or other defects in the results. The other, more robust type was an essentially ordinary camera with a special sliding holder for the plates and filters that allowed each in turn to be efficiently shifted into position for exposure—an operation sometimes partly or even entirely automated with a pneumatic mechanism or spring-powered motor.