This is a fascinating collection of color photographs by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. He started the project in 1909, and his mission was to document the vast and diverse Russian Empire.
A quick glance at Wikipedia reveals that experiments in color photography began as early as the 1840s, but color cameras were not commercially available until the early 1900s. Even then, color photography was not widely used until around the 1960s. Prokudin-Gorsky's color images involved a complicated process of taking three monochromatic photographs, each with a different color filter, and combining the images to reveal the original color scene.
Even though these scenes are from a time and place that are completely foreign to me, the color seems to make it much less distant. Isn't it amazing how color changes your perception of an image? And how much photography has shaped our view of history?
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