Press Review

For lovers of beautiful books and cultural items Germany is surely a sort of Eldorado! In my case, I buy 90% of my books and cultural products there, and the reason is quite obvious: it's cheap! Just try to find the most important operas recorded by Maria Callas for about 50 euros, and elsewhere as in Germany!

Thanks to one of my German booksellers I recently discovered the works of Mikhailovitsch Prokudin-Gorski, a pioneer of color-photography, who traveled across whole Russia on behalf of the government, in order to collect pictures describing most aspects of the country of Tsar Nicholas II. The beautiful pictures of Prokudin-Gorski show us scenes of everyday life in Russia during the very first years of the XXth century: landscapes, churches, cities, workers, farmers, construction sites, roads, bridges, factories, ethnic groups, etc., in short, a deep insight into pre-revolutionary Russia. Let's quote from the original presentation (with my own English translation):

Sergei Michailowitsch Prokudin-Gorski war ein Pionier der russischen Fotografie und ein Pionier der Farbfotografie, dessen Geschichte eine nahezu Ungeschriebene ist. Wie so viele Künstler und Wissenschaftler des vorrevolutionären Russlands ist er in Vergessenheit geraten und bis heute ein blinder Fleck in der Geschichtsschreibung der Fotografie geblieben. Dieses Schicksal teilt Prokudin-Gorski mit den kürzlich wiederentdeckten Malern des russischen Realismus, den Peredwischniki (Wanderern), der bedeutendsten russischen Sezessionsbewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts, die sich gegen die in Form und Inhalt erstarrte traditionelle Akademiemalerei wandte und, insbesondere in den malerischen Landschaftsdarstellungen und den Szenen aus dem Leben der russischen Landbevölkerung, den Fotografien Prokudin-Gorskis nicht unähnlich sind. Die Zeit, in die das Schaffen Prokudin-Gorskis fällt - das ausgehende 19. Jahrhundert und die ersten beiden jahrzehnte des 20. Jahrhunderts -, war eine Zeit der permanenten Unruhe, eine Zeit der Expansion und des Machterhalts, eine Zeit massiver gesellschaftlicher, politischer und technischer Umbrüche. Einige dieser Veranderungen bahnten sich langsam an; ihre Konsequenzen konnten wohl nur erahnt werden, andere waren kaum mehr zu leugnen. Das alte Russland Tolstois und Tschechows war im Begriff, sich nach und nach aufzulösen.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian pioneer of (color) photography, whose history is an almost unwritten one. Like so many artists and scientists of pre-revolutionary Russia, he got forgotten and remained a blind spot in the historiography of photography. Prokudin-Gorski shares this fate with some recently rediscovered painters of Russian Realism, the Peredvizhniki (wanderers), the most important Russian secessionist movement of the 19th century, which opposed the solidified form and content of traditional academy painting and, in particular, in the picturesque landscapes and scenes from the life of the Russian peasantry, were not so dissimilar to the photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky. The time in which the work of Prokudin-Gorsky occurs - the end of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th - was a time of constant turmoil, a time of expansion and maintaining power, a time of massive social, political and technical breaks. Some of those changes came slowly forwards; their consequences could probably only be guessed, others were little more undeniable. The old Russia of Tolstoy and Chekhov was about to disintegrate gradually.

For his color photographs Prokudin-Gorski - who was also a scientist - should have used an experimental chemical system, while the Lumière brothers were inventing their famous 'autochrome', but it is probably not the same technique. Some of the pictures displayed below were damaged (glass plate broken), and I had to restore them before turning them into stereoscopies. That process can be compared to what the music industry calls a "digital remastering".