Emir Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara
I have loved photography as long as I can remember. It is part of a continuum of everything I do involving vision and seeing. I was never the star student in art class as a kid — I never learned to draw — so when I was about 10 and we were given a choice between drawing, sculpture, and photography for our project, I immediately chose the one of the three I knew I could do. I ran around with a camera taking out-of-focus images of the light reflected off of objects. When I turned in my black-and-white prints, my teacher studied them carefully and asked how I had produced them. She seemed amazed and curious. That day, I felt the power of photography to make us wonder.
Yesterday, I happened upon photographs taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, a photographer sponsored by Tsar Nicholas II to record southern and central Russia from 1909 to 1912, before the world wars and communism. The images I had seen from a century ago were all black-and-white, and often degraded, creating an otherworldly distance. To make matters worse, the view cameras of the time required very long exposures, so the people posing for images were told not to smile or move so as not to blur the image. In these Russian color photographs, most of the subjects are also stoically holding a pose for a long period, but a few are in more natural, almost “candid” poses, something rarely seen in photographs of that era.
The color in these photographs collapsed time for me. The grass and the trees are the same as today. The people are as real as my neighbors. The color and the perfect preservation of the images transported me. In 1907, the Lumiere brothers invented a camera that allowed with the use of three lenses with red, green and blue filters, the making of color photographs. A few extraordinary examples of photographs taken with the Lumiere brothers’ process and other early color processes are still in existence.
Here’s a link to more of the photographs, via The Boston Globe:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html
