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| Emir of Bukhara in Bukhara (1911), from Nostalgia |
Nostalgia: The Russian Empire of Czar Nicholas II. The Russia of Czar
Nicholas II in laboriously restored historical color photographs by
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii
by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii; Robert Klanten, Editor
Gestalten, Berlin, 2012
...
In 1914 the Russian Empire was among the Allied Powers who went to war
against Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Central Powers. Three years
later, in the upheaval of the Bolshevik Revolution, Czar Nicholas II
abdicated, Russia withdrew from the conflict, and in 1918, the czar and
his family were murdered.
That same year, among the native Russians who left the country, was a
chemist and pioneering photographer named Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii
(1863-1944). He was wise to leave because his family had ties to the
aristocracy and the military, and in recent years, he had been working
for the czar. Beginning in 1909, he had been given financial support, a
mobile darkroom, and unusually lenient permission to travel, for the
purpose of documenting the people, architecture, landmarks and natural
surroundings of what was then the largest, most diverse empire in
history. That achievement in itself is amazing, but there is another
dimension that makes it more extraordinary—Prokudin-Gorskii’s
photographs were made in color, at a time when color photography was
rudimentary. Indeed, it would not be widely available for another 25
years.
This impressive volume is a large-sized “coffee table book” in which are
collected (in maximum page size) more than 300 of Prokudin-Gorskii’s
photographs. There are also informative essays about the purpose and
range of his travels. Many of these photographs can only be said to be
stunning, because of their richness of color, of course, but also
because they provide us with eyewitness views of what it was like to be
alive under the rule of Nicholas II, as distinct from the later infamous
regimes of the Communists.
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