Color Russian Photos from 100 Years Ago

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August 29, 2010

I don’t usually take single photographic links and make one post out of them, but sometimes something is so freakin’ cool…

From 1909 to 1912, the Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was given a crap-ton of money by the Tsar Nicholas II to go take pictures with a fancy camera that could take black and white photos in a way in which they could later be turned into color photos.

Incredibly high quality color photos.

It kind of feels like I’m looking at ghosts.

BSKY

Seth Fischer

Seth Fischerâ€™s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writerâ€™s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.