Rare old photographs (119). Old color photographs of Native Americans

As a director, I am drawn to images. The love for film came from the old black and white films of such recognized masters of cinema as Bergman, Eisenstein, Buñuel, Lang, Dreyer, Ozu and others. For a time in college, I even felt almost like a traitor when I watched color movies. But with age came the recognition of color, and now I find it difficult to stick to a monochrome diet. Life is too brilliant for one tone.

I developed a fondness for researching old photographs of indigenous peoples while working on the film Moses at Mass. This is the story of a German-Jewish immigrant who fell in love with an Acoma Indian girl and became the ruler of her people in New Mexico in the late 1800s.

I looked at black and white photographs of beautiful mysterious people, and could not believe that someone wants to destroy them from the continent, pursuing a conscious policy for over a hundred years. It seemed so inhuman and barbaric. Digging deeper, I began to find colorized photographs of early Americans. In them, people came to life even more. Looking at them, I see personalities with royal dignity, which do not differ from the historical portraits of European kings, queens and nobility. Except that they not only display majestic regalia, but also strong, natural faces, rather than the weak, dry gaze of some overseas rulers that brought their downfall.

Most of the photographs discovered were hand-coloured, as color film remained an experimental field until the 1930s. Painting in black and white is an art in itself. Many of the colorized images show the talent of photographers who have preserved for us true images of seemingly disappearing people. Of course, the Native Americans did not disappear, despite persistent efforts. They become even stronger, but their historical way of life, by and large, can only be found in these photographs.

Here is a collection of colorized photographs of Indians. If you liked them, you can find more pictures in the historical photo archive at Facebook.
Paul Ratner(Paul Ratner).

Lots of high quality color photos of Tsarist Russia.
Taken from here.

Gorgeous, juicy and absolutely modern-looking photos of pre-revolutionary Russia from the library of the American Congress. This is a fresh and goosebumps-on-the-back look at Russia at the turn of the century. What it really looked like. People and architecture, objects and views. Like a time machine...

Here is the history of these photos:

A certain person by the name of Prokudin-Gorsky in 1909-10 came up with the following thing: to photograph objects 3 times through 3 filters - red, green and blue. It turned out 3 black and white photographs. The projection of the three plates had to be simultaneous. He used a small folding camera like the one designed by Adolf Mieth. Three exposures of the same object were required, taken approximately one second apart, onto the same glass plate 84–88 mm wide and 232 mm long. The plate changed position each time, and the image was captured through three different color filters. The objects being filmed had to be stationary, which was a big limitation. shows how it was done, and .

The projector has also undergone changes. Prokudin-Gorsky improved the model of F.E. Iva, created the apparatus according to his own drawings: three diamond-shaped prisms were fastened together, creating one combined prism. Thus, it was possible to focus all three colors on the screen.

The only thing he could do with all this at the time was put them into 3 different projectors, with red, green, and blue respectively, and point the projectors to the same screen. It turned out a color image. He began to work actively on the problems of color cinematography. Keeping in touch with many scientific societies in the country and abroad, he traveled with reports to Berlin, London, Rome.

He did not forget about the Russian public either. Back in 1900, he received the Grand Prix at the international exhibition in Paris. In 1913, he performed a slide show in the largest Parisian cinema. The success was so huge that large foreign companies bombarded him with job offers. But he could not leave Russia: too much was connected with it. Prokudin-Gorsky in 1909, through the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, who was the Honorary Chairman of the St. Petersburg Photographic Society, received an audience with Tsar Nicholas II. The Tsar invites Prokudin-Gorsky to perform with a display of slides in front of the Imperial Court in Tsarskoe Selo. During the show, Sergei Mikhailovich had to comment on the pictures, and he did it simply dramatically.

By the end of the demonstration, an admiring whisper was heard in the hall. At the end, the king shook his hand, the empress and the royal children congratulated him on his success. Then the tsar instructs him to photograph all sorts of aspects of life in all the regions that then made up the Russian Empire.

Although this project seemed very bold, ultimate goal Prokudin-Gorsky was to familiarize Russian schoolchildren with the vast and diverse history, culture and modernization of the Empire with the help of his “optical color projections (most likely, also to familiarize the heir to the throne with all this). For this, the photographer was issued two special permits. The first one said that His Imperial Majesty the Highest allows him to stay in any place, regardless of secrecy, and photograph even strategically important objects.

The second was the decree of the minister, which announced that the Emperor considered the mission entrusted to Prokudin-Gorsky so important that all officials should assist him "anywhere and at any time." For the trip, the photographer was given at full disposal an assistant in organizational matters and a Pullman car, which was specially adapted: a well-equipped laboratory was set up there, including a dark room, so that the development of photographic plates could be carried out even on the road. The photographer himself and his assistants, including his 22-year-old son Dmitry, fit in the carriage. There was hot and cold water, a glacier...

To work on the Mariinsky canal system, they provided a special vessel and a small sloop with a motor. Between 1909 and 1912, and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorsky surveyed eleven regions of the Russian Empire. The emperor insistently demanded that Prokudin-Gorsky be provided with everything necessary, and even expressed a desire to follow him on one of his future trips. In addition to photography, Prokudin-Gosrsky gave many lectures, illustrating his work.

The first official viewing by the tsar of photographs of the waterway of the Mariinsky Canal and the industrial Urals took place in March 1910; the last exhibition of photographs was opened in March 1918 in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace. (You can also find a detailed biography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky).

Staritsa. General view from the Volga

Prokudin-Gorsky managed to leave during the revolution, and he managed to take with him 20 boxes of photographic plates, about a thousand photographs in total - with the exception of photographs of strategically important objects and photographs of the royal family seized from him (he managed to take with him only one photo of the young prince). Color photographs of the royal family may have remained somewhere in our archives. The equipment and the projector could not be taken away. In exile, the goal of Prokudin-Gorsky - to reveal the benefits of color photography for education and science - remained unchanged. In England, he patented the development of an optical system for a movie camera. To test it, he moved to Nice in 1922, where, together with the Lumiere brothers, he opened a photo laboratory.

In 1948, after his death, his son sold these records in Paris american library Congress. It turned out to be very difficult to turn them into ordinary color images due to the fact that most of them had a non-trivial spatial discrepancy between the three color versions. So they lay quietly until recently. And suddenly it occurred to some library official: they also need to be scanned, loaded into Adobe Photoshop, and there the contours of the three color options should be combined. They did so, and were amazed: the world, long gone, and known only by bad black and white photographs, suddenly rose in all its colors ...

Permian

If you want to try to find familiar places or your hometown in this archive, then it is most convenient to use a special search: you enter any word in the box (for example, Volga), and you get the desired result. For each photo there is an uncompressed tif-version (up to 50 mb). You can see the smallest details on it. In order to view an enlarged (about 4 times) version of this photo, it is enough to replace the letter "r" with "v" before the last point of the copied address. The resolution of these shots is such that the quality of the image will not deteriorate. In order to get the largest version in .tif format, you need to substitute "u.tif" instead of "r.jpg" in the address. But it will take a very long time to load :) I don’t know about you, but for me the photos evoke a feeling not only of harmony and some special solidity of THE Russian life, but also of the incredible power and vitality of Russia of that time ... In all cities and villages something is being repaired, erected, under construction, electric poles have already been built everywhere, wires have been laid ...

Old road to Moscow. Rzhev city:

General view of Belozersk from the ramparts:

Ryazan. View from the bell tower of the Assumption Cathedral:

Ryazan. General view from the north:

Ryazan. View from the southeast:

Ekaterinburg. General view of the southern part:

Ekaterinburg. General view of the central part:

Factory settlements of the Verkh-Isetsky plant (Yekaterinburg)

The place of the former throne in the temporary canvas. Church of the Musketeer Regiment (Yekaterinburg)

The refectory and the Church of the Sorrowful Mother of God in the monastery (Tikhvin Monastery) Yekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg city. General view of the northern part

Ekaterinburg. Observatory on Pleshivaya Gora:

Planer of the Imperial Lapidary Factory. Ekaterinburg

View of the Zlatoust plant. In the distance is Mount Taganay:

General view of Perm from the city hills:

View of Perm from the railway bridge across the Kama:

View of the church of St. George. Staraya Ladoga:

Torzhok. View from the west side:

Torzhok. View of the city from the north:

View from the rampart to Torzhok:

Torzhok. Camp and barracks:

Torzhok. Borisoglebsky Monastery from the bridge:

City of Smolensk. View from the bell tower of the Assumption Cathedral:

City of Polotsk.

View of the Kamensky iron-smelting plant:

Rostov the Great. Kekina Gymnasium:

General view of Rostov from the bell tower of the Church of All Saints:

General view of the city of Kirillov from the bell tower of the Kazan Cathedral:

View of Suzdal along the Kamenka River:

You can also compare with a modern photo of the same area.

Vladimir city:

Suzdal. View from the bell tower of the Rizopolozhensky Monastery:

View of the riverside part of Tyumen from the monastery:

Tobolsk:

View of Tobolsk from the Assumption Cathedral:

Cherdyn:

Blast furnaces at the Satka plant:

city view Kineshma from the east:

On the hay near the halt. Russian empire.

Three generations. Andrey Petrov Kalganov, his son and his granddaughter.

(Photographer's note: former foreman of the plant. He was in the service for 55 years. He had the good fortune to bring bread and salt to His Imperial Majesty). The last two work in the workshops of the Zlatoust plant.

City of Staritsa. Volga side.

Moscow river from the Ferapontovsky monastery. At Mozhaisk:

Olonchan type:

Dairy in Dagomys:

School in the village of Perguba:

Old boyar cart "radka":

Antique sleds from the 18th century:

Peasant hut in the village of Martyanova:

Construction of a gateway near the village of Kuzminsky on the Oka:

Sawmill on the Oka River:

Construction of the dam (Beloomut):

River Oka. Engine room:

Sawing logs:

Dam construction works:

City of Cherdyn:

In the city of Zlatoust:

North-western part of the city of Zlatoust:

Stone-cutting machine:

Alexandrov. General view of the Trinity Monastery:

Torzhok. View of the city from the east side:

Mill and dam on the river Polotya:

Peasants on the mowing:

View of the new Ladoga:

City of Dvinsk:

Kasli settlements with a lake:

Rzhev city:

Pumps for pumping water:

General view of the northwestern part of Smolensk:

Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Tobolsk:

Cordon (gatehouse) in the forest:

Drying nets on Lake Karyakino:

Vitebsk:

Monks at work. Planting potatoes:

The hut of the settler Artemy, nicknamed Kota, who has been living in this place for more than 40 years:

And in this photo the film crew itself:

I quote almost all the captions to the photographs in their original form, no gag. In general, the idea was brilliant. Interestingly, they all fully understood what they were doing for us.

Even then, three years ago, looking at these photos, I was amazed at the wholeness, peace and strength that is poured there. It was felt that the whole Russian life of that time was permeated with the spirit of some kind of unity. And so, I still wanted to somehow express this spirit in words. And only now, having returned to these photos, I realized what this calmness means; what does it mean: "Home owner".

View all color photos Russian Empire early 20th century (1902 photographs by Prokudin-Gorsky) can be found at www.prokudin-gorsky.ru (complete database of color images by S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky), in Russian.

Restored photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky are on the site museum.ru

Color photographs by Prokudin-Gorsky

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944) made a significant contribution to the development of photography. A graduate of the Technological Institute in St. Petersburg, Sergei Mikhailovich continued his studies as a chemist in Berlin and Paris. Collaborated with famous chemists and inventors: Edme Jules Maumene (1818-1898) and Adolf Miethe (Adolf Miethe, 1862-1927), together with whom he developed promising methods of color photography.

On December 13, 1902, Prokudin-Gorsky first announced the creation of color transparencies using the three-color photography method, and in 1905 he patented his sensitizer, which was superior in quality to similar developments by foreign chemists, including the Mite sensitizer.

Since that time, Prokudin-Gorsky has been taking color photographs of L.N. Tolstoy, F.I. Chaliapin, the royal family and many other people. His photographs of ancient vases, exhibits of the Hermitage, were subsequently used to restore their lost color.

Color photograph of Leo Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana, 1908

In 1909, Prokudin-Gorsky received an audience with Tsar Nicholas II, expressed to him his idea to capture contemporary Russia in color photographs - its culture, history, all kinds of aspects of life in all areas that then made up the Russian Empire.

The tsar approved the photographer's plans and provided him with a specially equipped railway carriage. Officials were instructed to help Prokudin-Gorsky in his travels and not interfere even in photographing strategic objects, including bridges and factories.

Steam locomotive "Compound" with superheater "Schmidt", 1909

In 1909-1915, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled to a significant part of Russia, photographing ancient temples and monasteries, views of cities, fields and forests, various everyday scenes of the Russian hinterland. In the same years, in Samarkand, Prokudin-Gorsky tested a film camera invented by him for color filming. However, the quality of the film was unsatisfactory.

After the October Revolution, Prokudin-Gorsky left Russia, taking with him almost all the photographic plates (RGB-plates) made, with the exception of photographs of the royal family and strategic objects seized from him.

Once in exile, the photographer spent some time in Norway and England. Moving to Nice in 1922, Prokudin-Gorsky worked with the Lumière brothers. In the early 30s, the photographer was engaged in educational activities in France and was even going to make new series photographs of artistic monuments of France and its colonies. This idea was realized by the son of Prokudin-Gorsky - Mikhail.

Prokudin-Gorsky died in Paris on September 27, 1944, a few weeks after the liberation of the city by the Allied forces. He was buried in the Russian cemetery in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois (Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois).

The fate of the collection of color photographs by Prokudin-Gorsky

The collection of color photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was bought from his heirs in 1948 by the Library of Congress and has been in the archives for a long time. Only development computer technology allowed us to process these images and show the unique views of the Russian Empire in full color.

In 2001, the Library of Congress opened the exhibition "The Empire That Was Russia". For her, the glass plates were scanned and the original color photographs were recreated using a computer, retouched and color corrected.

In total, the collection of Prokudin-Gorsky - “Collection of sights of Russia in natural colors” - has 1902 color and about 1000 black and white photographs. Their restoration and processing continues to this day.

We offer a selection of interesting and rare old photographs that will help you make a journey into the past.

James Cameron on the set of Titanic

Beach at the Peter and Paul Fortress, Leningrad, 1970s

Stela about the stay of I.V. Stalin in Polyarny, 1940s

Street trading on Kalinin Avenue in Moscow, early 90s

Experimental Soviet taxi, 1964

Pitsunda, 1982

In a promotional photo of British Petroleum gas stations, Swedish Air Force personnel from the F-16 Uppsala military base refuel and service a SAAB 105 jet trainer. 80s

Kiosk with ice cream and milkshakes, 1964, Moscow

Watering tram, 1990, Leningrad

Nirvana Halloween 1993 Akron, Ohio, USA
Left to right: Kurt Cobain, Big John Duncan, Pat Smear, Krist Novoselic.

The Smoker, 1964, Leatherwood

Girl and dogs, 1977, Miami, USA

Meeting Henry Kissinger with Dolly Parton, 1985, USA

The search for wives. 1901 Montana

After the landing of five thousand troops of the southern coalition 40-45 kilometers north of the city on October 20, 1950, the capital of the DPRK fell.
The photograph shows the interrogation of North Korean prisoners of war by the South Korean military police.

Camouflage mausoleum-mosque Taj Mahal during the third Indo-Pakistani war in December 1971, as a result of which East Pakistan (Bangladesh) gained independence.

Dosimetric control of Chernobyl employees, 1990, USSR
All employees of the station, and especially the 4th block, were required to undergo a special check for radiation when leaving work. If an employee was not “clean” enough, a red signal would light up and the turnstile would not work. Then it was necessary to return and once again wash in the shower, using "RADEZ"
Photographer Victoria Ivleva

Father and son supplying water to a rice field, 1952, Vietnam

Four women captured by the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising are photographed through barbed wire in the Stalag VI-C camp after their release. Third Reich. April 1945.

Fighter MiG-15 of the USSR Air Force in combat. DPRK. 1950-1953.

Winners of the XV-th cycling race around the Kremlin, dedicated to the Soviet youth. Moscow. RSFSR. THE USSR. 1979

Vatican Women's Rifle Squad. Vatican. Kingdom of Italy. 1937

Tanks on the central square of the city during the Romanian Revolution. Bucharest. 1989

Parade on Red Square on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. RSFSR. THE USSR. November 1927.

Albert Einstein with his wife Elsa, Grand Canyon, 1931

Sylvester Stallone, 1979

The girl says goodbye to the soldier leaving for the war. London, 1940

3-year-old girl with a pony, 1955

Schoolchildren are assembling machine guns, Stalinsk (Novokuznetsk), 1943

Yuri Nikulin before the beginning of the anniversary evening, 1991.

City defender. Stalingrad, USSR. January 1943.

Sir Thomas Lipton is the inventor of the Lipton tea bag.

Library in Prague Castle, 1950.

Film crew and actors of the film "Back to the Future", USA, 1985.

Tennis players, 1964

L. Kuravlyov and N. Varley on the set of the film "Wii".

Elizabeth Beardm is the first female motorcyclist to travel around the world.

Leonid Gaidai on the set of the film "Ivan Vasilyevich Changes Profession", 1973

Soviet servicemen inspect a German carriage of a 240-mm gun carriage, manufactured by Skoda, captured in the Krasnoe Selo area.
The German designation for the gun is 24 cm Kanone M.16 (t). Similar guns were in service with the 2nd Battalion of the 84th Artillery Regiment (II./AR 84), which participated in the shelling of Leningrad.

Princess Diana, 1960s

"Moskvich 408" with the right wheel (export).

William Joyce, better known as "Lord Howe Howe" under the supervision of armed guards to ensure that there was no possibility of escape. He was captured from his home in Germany in May 1945.
Joyce William one of the leaders of the British Nazis.
In May 1945 he was arrested by the British authorities. Convicted by a British court of war crimes and sentenced to death penalty. Executed.

Civilians greet Soviet soldiers on a captured German tank Pz.Kpfw.III.

The retreating Germans blow up the bridge in Florence. Italy, 1944.

Container for holy relics from the Basel Cathedral. 1450s.

The hit of a German bomb in the cruiser "Chervona Ukraine", Sevastopol, 11/12/1941
German aerial photography during the raid on November 12, 1941.
The cruiser, standing at the Grafskaya pier in Sevastopol, received two bomb hits during the raid, which claimed the lives of about seventy sailors and caused serious damage to the ship, from which it sank the next day.

1943 North Africa. The wounded before being loaded into a heavy German transport aircraft Messerschmitt Me.323D-8 "Gigant" in Tunisia.

Finnish soldiers at the armored locomotive. The design of the pipe is interesting, apparently this was done in order to direct the smoke to the ground, excluding the unmasking of the armored train because of it.

Patrol of the Italian people's militia on the streets of Milan. April 26, 1945

Hero of the Soviet Union and Hero Russian Federation Doctor of Medicine Lieutenant Colonel Polyakov (he spent the longest time in space in one flight - 437 days) watches through the window the approach of the Discovery shuttle. Research orbital station "Mir", February 3, 1995.

Napoleon Bonaparte's triple-barreled 120-caliber pocket pistol, inlaid with gold, was presented to him in 1802.

Chechen fighters in Grozny. 90s

THE USSR. Moscow. Bus-bath, handed over by the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions to the sponsored division. Photo of the beginning 1940s

RF. Penthouse #1

THE USSR. Moscow. Sale of Brazilian oranges. 1962

Popeye 1940s

TV factory. East Germany. 1954

Cinema in flight. USA 60s

Russian artist Ilya Glazunov - paints a portrait of Gina Lollobrigida. Rome 1963

Vincent Spano, Isabella Rossellini & Monica Bellucci by Steven Meisel 1992

Fashion glasses. 1960

Bosniaks in Sarajevo read a message about the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary, 1908.
Six years later, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand would be shot dead on the same spot by Serbian student Gavrilo Princip.

Ship control simulator in navigation school. Glasgow, 1913

Soviet press in 1924:
"Tov. Lunion, a member of the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, a representative of the most oppressed, most enslaved part of the working people - the French colonial blacks - is resting on ... the ancient throne of the Russian tsars, preserved as a museum exhibit in the Kremlin. Now this is an ordinary chair.

London after the Luftwaffe raid, as seen from St Paul's Cathedral, January 3, 1941.

French actor Jean Gabin on the porch of his house, France, December 1949.

Underwater wedding, San Marcos, Texas, USA, 1954.

Portrait of Woodrow Wilson, 1918.

Soldiers of the army of Admiral Kolchak pose near the bodies of the executed Bolsheviks, 1919.

On April 26 - 30, 1991 Cyclone "Marian" passed in Bangladesh (maximum damage: April 29th) - 138,000 dead.

Marlon Brando with a cat.

"Dubino". USSR, 1931.

Grigory Alexandrov, Sergei Eisenstein, Walt Disney and cameraman Eduard Tisse.

Girls playing strip cards, 1941

Woody Allen and Michael Jackson at Studio 54, New York, 1977.

Stalin (third from left) with a group of Bolshevik revolutionaries in Turukhansk, Russian Empire, 1915

In April 1945, in the Gardelegen concentration camp, the SS drove about 1,100 prisoners into a barn and set it on fire. Some of the victims tried to escape but were shot dead by the guards.

Notes from the newspaper "Stalin's Way" dated August 15, 1935.

Eiffel Tower, July 1888.

Taxi rank at the Bolshoi Theatre. Moscow, 1935.
Photographer: Arkady Shaikhet.

Drinking Medal: Collar with a cast-iron star with the inscription "For drunkenness". Russia, first half of the 18th century, cast iron, casting, iron, forging.

John Lennon / John Lennon

A group of prisoners from the Taganka prison returns from a morning performance at the Bolshoi Theater, which they attended as a reward for good behavior, 1902.

The earliest known photograph of the Chernobyl disaster, April 26, 1986.

Led Zeppelin, 1969
Photographer: Ron Raffaelli.

This is exactly what LIFE magazine said the ideal female figure looked like in 1938. The 20-year-old model June Cox was captured as an “ideal” - height about 168 cm, weight 56 kg.

Only nudists were not enough for us here. Photographer Zenon Zhiburtovich, Ogonyok N21, 1987.

Cribs. Moscow State University, 1984.
Photographer: Valery Khristoforov.

X-ray machine, Frankfurt, 1929.

A Turk washes his feet for his last prayer while Bulgarian soldiers prepare the gallows for him, 1913.

T-54 crushes the bus that the protesters blocked the passage. Operation Danube, 1968

RSO or Raupenschlepper Ost - a full-track multi-purpose tractor, originally used by the Wehrmacht troops on Eastern Front, at the end of the war - on all fronts.
The study of the very sad experience of using German wheeled, tracked and half-tracked vehicles during the 1941-1942 campaign on the Eastern Front led Steyr specialists to the idea of the need to create a simple and reliable artillery tractor with a purely tracked undercarriage. Taking as a basis the layout of the Soviet transport tractors STZ-5 and Stalinets-2, in many captured by German troops in the summer of 1941, by the middle of 1942 they had prepared a draft of such a tractor.

Donetsk airport, 1976.

Dali on a Playboy shoot. 1973

Uma Thurman. 1991

1954 Simone Silva and Robert Mitchum.
When Simone posed topless, she provoked a stampede in which one photographer broke his arm and another broke his leg. She was asked to leave the festival.

Soldiers of the Warsaw Pact countries, 1980s
There are seven flags (Bulgaria, Hungary, the GDR, Poland, Romania, the USSR, Czechoslovakia), and initially there were eight countries in the Warsaw Pact, including Albania, but Albania actually left the bloc in 1968 - after the entry of ATS troops into Czechoslovakia.

Prisoner in a French prison, 1900s. Mustaches were tattooed in protest against the administration.

Nalivayka 30s USSR

Aeroflot advertising booklet for foreigners from 1967 advertising flights on the New York-Moscow and Moscow-Tokyo routes. With prices for first and tourist class, as well as the promise of "real Russian cuisine" with black caviar and "the best vodka."

Starving prisoners, almost starving to death, used for "scientific" experiments. Concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria.
The camp was liberated on May 7, 1945.

Late 40s, Chelyabinsk region, USSR. Tank Sherman plows instead of a tractor

The demarcation line between the western Muslim and eastern Christian parts of Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. 1983

American gunners. Living collage on the occasion of the victory in World War I, Germany, 1918.

Female soldiers of the Red Guard in Finnish captivity, Finland, 1918.

US President's visit to Australia.
On October 21, 1966, two brothers pelted a limousine carrying Lyndon Johnson on a state visit to Australia with paint balloons. So they expressed their protest against the war in Vietnam.

American officers thump at Hitler's private residence in Bavaria, in the Alps, May 8, 1945.

Before tablets with laptops, Paris, 1947.

Container for poisons in the form of a book, 17th century.

"Cleaning the barrel" of the main battery gun (15-inch) of the British battleship HMS Royal Oak, 1916.

The dance of fidelity is a ritual dance that symbolized the dancer's devotion to the country's leader Mao Zedong, 1967.

Money changers near the Beryozka store 80s

The boy is holding a poster "All I want for Christmas is a clean white school"
- Protests after black girl Ruby Bridges was the first to attend a white school, New Orleans, 1960.

An invoice for the repair of a Renault car owned by Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich. Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich is the son of his full namesake, known as "KR". In 1918 he was killed by the Bolsheviks. He was canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.

And also the names of the rivers flowing through the territory of Moscow:
Krovyanka, Beggar, Samotyga, Ulcer, Fever, Boar, Frog, Cockroach, Nigella, Rotten. There was also a Sukovo (Sukino) swamp, and Chistye Prudy were called Pogany

Although this project seemed very daring, the ultimate goal of Prokudin-Gorsky was to familiarize Russian schoolchildren with the vast and diverse history, culture and modernization of the Empire through his “optical color projections (most likely also to familiarize the heir to the throne with all this). For this, the photographer was issued two special permits. The first one said that His Imperial Majesty the Highest allows him to stay in any place, regardless of secrecy, and photograph even strategically important objects.

The first official viewing by the tsar of photographs of the waterway of the Mariinsky Canal and the industrial Urals took place in March 1910; the last exhibition of photographs was opened in March 1918 in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace. (A detailed biography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky can be found).

In 1948, after his death, his son sold these records to the American Library of Congress in Paris. It turned out to be very difficult to turn them into ordinary color images due to the fact that most of them had a non-trivial spatial discrepancy between the three color versions. So they lay quietly until recently. And suddenly it occurred to some library official: they also need to be scanned, loaded into Adobe Photoshop, and there the contours of the three color options should be combined. And so they did, and were amazed: the world, long gone, and known only from bad black-and-white photographs, suddenly rose in all its colors ...

If you want to try to find familiar places or your hometown in this archive, it is most convenient to use: you enter any word in the box (for example, Volga), and you get the desired result. For each photo there is an uncompressed tif-version (up to 50 mb). You can see the smallest details on it. In order to view an enlarged (about 4 times) version of this photo, it is enough to replace the letter "r" with "v" before the last point of the copied address. The resolution of these shots is such that the quality of the image will not deteriorate. In order to get the largest version in .tif format, you need to substitute "u.tif" instead of "r.jpg" in the address. But it will take a very long time to load :) I don’t know about you, but for me the photos evoke a feeling not only of harmony and some special solidity of THE Russian life, but also of the incredible power and vitality of Russia of that time ... In all cities and villages something is being repaired, erected, under construction, electric poles have already been built everywhere, wires have been laid ...

In general, the idea was brilliant. Interestingly, they all fully understood what they were doing for us.

Once in exile, the photographer spent some time in Norway and England. Moving to Nice in 1922, Prokudin-Gorsky worked with the Lumière brothers. In the early 30s, the photographer was engaged in educational activities in France and was even going to make a new series of photographs of the artistic monuments of France and its colonies. This idea was realized by the son of Prokudin-Gorsky - Mikhail.

The collection of color photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was bought from his heirs in 1948 by the Library of Congress and has been in the archives for a long time. Only the development of computer technology made it possible to process these images and show the unique views of the Russian Empire in full color.

In total, the collection of Prokudin-Gorsky - "Collection of sights of Russia in natural colors" - contains 1902 color and about 1000 black and white photographs. Their restoration and processing continues to this day.

The documentary film "The Color of Time" is dedicated to the life and work of the photo artist and chemist S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky, who made a significant contribution to the development of color photography and cinematography. At the beginning of the 20th century, under his leadership, a collection of color photographic views of the Russian Empire was created. S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky is the author of a color portrait of L. N. Tolstoy. Professor S. P. Garanina, a leading specialist in the work of S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky, takes part in the film.