This just came to my attention via a Russian blog called EnglishRussia.com. Want to see mind-blowing color photographs from Czarist Russia? Try this Library of Congress site. The photos are by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who created the color images by making multiple photographs through colored filters and combining the images, a procedure made much easier now in the days of digital image manipulation. I don’t think the photographer was ever able to see all of these in their current full-blown glory, either…
Here’s the official blurb for that shot:
Samarkand, an ancient commercial, intellectual, and spiritual center on the Silk Road from Europe to China, developed a remarkably diverse population, including Tajiks, Persians, Uzbeks, Arabs, Jews, and Russians. Samarkand, and all of West Turkestan, was incorporated into the Russian Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century and has retained its ethnic diversity up to the present. Prokudin-Gorskii captures here a group of Jewish boys, in traditional dress, studying with their teacher.
The images are stunning. Also enlightening is comparing some of these pre-WWI photos with photos from today’s Russia posted at EnglishRussia.com. How far (or how little) we have come.
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Like a time machine, those photographs were.