Journeys by means of the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

On the flip of the 20th century, the photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky undertook a quest to doc an empire that was present process fast change resulting from industrialization and the constructing of railroads. Between 1903 and 1916 Prokudin-Gorsky, who developed a pioneering methodology of capturing coloration photographs on glass plates, scoured the Russian Empire with the patronage of Nicholas II. Intrepidly carrying his cumbersome and awkward digicam from the western borderlands over the Volga River to Siberia and central Asia, he created a singular report of Imperial Russia.

In 1918 Prokudin-Gorsky escaped an more and more chaotic, violent Russia and regained almost 2,000 of his cumbersome glass negatives. His subsequent peripatetic existence earlier than settling in Paris makes his assortment’s survival all of the extra miraculous. The U.S. Library of Congress acquired Prokudin-Gorsky’s assortment in 1948, and since then it has change into a touchstone for understanding pre-revolutionary Russia. Now digitized and publicly obtainable, his photographs are a sensation in Russia, the place individuals go to web sites devoted to them.

William Craft Brumfield—photographer, scholar, and the main authority on Russian structure within the West—started working with Prokudin-Gorsky’s images in 1985. He curated the primary public exhibition of them in the USA and has annotated all the assortment. In
Journeys by means of the Russian Empire, Brumfield—who has spent a long time traversing Russia and photographing buildings and landscapes of their varied levels of disintegration or restoration—juxtaposes Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs in opposition to these he took of the identical buildings and areas. In analyzing the intersections between his personal pictures and that of Prokudin-Gorsky, Brumfield assesses the state of preservation of Russia’s architectural heritage and calls into query the nostalgic assumptions of those that see Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs because the restoration of the misplaced previous of an idyllic, pre-Soviet Russia.

This lavishly illustrated quantity—which options some 400 gorgeous full-color photographs of historic church buildings and mosques, railways and monasteries, cities and distant pure landscapes—is a testomony to 2 good photographers whose work prompts and illuminates, monument by monument, questions of conservation, restoration, and cultural id and reminiscence.