Mick Hartley

I was checking the Spektator – "Your monthly guide to what's happening in and around Bishkek" – to see if they had any analysis of the ethnic violence there in Kyrgyzstan (they don't, but they do have a useful newsfeed), and came across this (pdf): old colour photos of the Russian Empire taken by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.

Here, for instance, "Young Russian peasant women offer berries to visitors to their izba, a traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River near the small town of Kirillov" in Western Russia:

There are a hundred pages to click through, though you'll need to scroll down each page to read the descriptions.

Prokudin-Gorsky travelled around Russia in a private railroad carriage provided by Tsar Nicholas II recording the vastness and the diversity of the Russian Empire. His specially constructed camera took three images in quick succession through different coloured filters, allowing a full colour image to be reconstructed.

The US Library of Congress purchased Prokudin-Gorsky's archive in 1948. From Wikipedia:

It was only with the advent of digital image processing that multiple images could be satisfactorily combined into one. The Library of Congress undertook a project in 2000 to make digital scans of all the photographic material received from Prokudin-Gorsky's heirs and contracted with the photographer Walter Frankhauser to combine the monochrome negatives into colour images. He created 122 color renderings using a method he called digichromatography and commented that each image took him around six to seven hours to align, clean and colour-correct. In 2001, the Library of Congress produced an exhibition from these, The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated. The photographs have since been the subject of many other exhibitions in the area where Prokudin-Gorsky took his photos.

Some of the results are in the Wiki gallery: Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara, from 1911, for instance, or this bridge over the Kama river near Perm in the Urals, from 1910.