Back when color pho­tog­ra­phy was a mere con­cept, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii were pro­duc­ing art­work that were ground­break­ing & unique at time:

The sur­re­al­is­tic paint­ing look of the image were the result of mod­ern dig­i­tal process dubbed the Digichromatography, the team recre­ated the color dig­i­tal image from the scanned orig­i­nals and pro­cess­ing them to recre­ated the color to be as nat­ural as pos­si­ble. The sim­i­lar processed, applied with dif­fer­ent tech­niques was used by Prokudin-Gorskii to project the image for view­ing at that time.

A sin­gle, nar­row glass plate about 3 inches wide by 9 inches long was placed ver­ti­cally into the cam­era by Prokudin-Gorskii . He then pho­tographed the same scene three times in a fairly rapid sequence using a red fil­ter, a green fil­ter and a blue filter.

Hosted at the US Library of Congress are exhibits of some of his pho­to­graphic archives, in times of extreme mod­ern­iza­tion and over sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, it’s a relief to see the world so flatly serene and raw with a prod­uct of such metic­u­lous effort.

If you’re in a hurry, make sure you check out the Architecture & the People at Work sec­tion, it’s quite a rev­e­la­tion to see such col­or­ful images com­ing out of the 1900s.

Making Color Images from Prokudin-Gorskii’s Negatives