Amazing Photographs

Take a look at these:

Church of the Savior and the Intercession of the Most Holy Mother of God, churchyard in Vytegra.


Icon of the Day of Judgment [in the Church of the Transfiguration], village of Pid'ma.


Peasant girls from a rural area along the Sheksna River, near town of Kirillov



Now, let my ask you this: How old do you suppose these images from Russia are? Would you even begin to guess 100 years? Well, they are!

And they are not "colorized" B&W's using some photoshop expert, rather these are the actual colors seen by the camera using a very early "triple color technique" by S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky. These images are truly astonishing and can, in a way, take us back 100 years to pre-revolutionary Russia. Naturally, today's technology allows to see the images more vividly than Prokudin-Gorsky could have dreamed. And the pics span from ALL OVER the vast Russian empire.

THIS website has a massive database of the images.

And THIS one has the same images (not as many) with a bit more detail about where they were taken and the images are cleaned up a bit. Amazing clarity. Looking at them, I have to keep reminding myself that they are in fact windows to the past. I could spend hours at these websites.

Comments

Mimi said…
Beautiful. I love how vivid the girls' dresses are.

And, are they going to eat beets?
Those are absolutely amazing, aren't they? The Library of Congress also has 1,902 color images of Prokudin-Gorskii available here. That's where I first ran across them several years ago.

Another good LOC collection is the Matson Photo Archive negatives, here. These are old, mostly black and white photos of the Holy Land, Middle East, and North Africa from the late 1800s and early 1900s, before much modernization had taken place. They're also amazing.

Just click the browse by subject links on either of those pages to access the pics. Or you can search for particular items. It's fun just to wander through.

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