A Russian Photographer Captures Central Asia in Color

In the early years of the twentieth century, the Russian chemist and photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky embarked on an expansive enterprise to document the Russian Empire in full color. Trained as a chemist and photographer in St. Petersburg, he brought rigorous scientific discipline to photography. At the time, practical color photographic paper did not yet exist, and commercial color emulsions were in their infancy. Prokudin-Gorsky relied instead on the three-color principle first proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, capturing three separate monochrome exposures of each scene through red, green, and blue optical filters.

Prokudin-Gorsky polished his technical understanding through study in Berlin and Paris. Rather than using flexible film, which was still supplanting glass across the medium, practitioners of the three-color system favored rigid glass negatives because they preserved exact dimensional stability. A single oblong plate was exposed three times in rapid succession, once through each color filter. When the three monochrome transparencies were illuminated through matching filters and projected in precise alignment, they reconstructed the original spectrum additively on a screen.