Your tax dollars at work!

[Hubris Boy]

Cellar Dwellars-

I wanted to share with you a remarkable collection of images that I found at the Library of Congress website. It's a series of COLOR photographs taken in pre-revolutionary Russia by a man named Sergei Prokudkin-Gorskii. Prokudkin-Gorskii took the photographs between 1909 and 1915 as part of a photographic survey of the empire for Tsar Nicholas II.

What's remarkable about these images is that they are truly COLOR photographs, not black-and-white photos that were hand-colored after development. Prokudkin-Gorskii used a camera that took three different images of the subject simultaneously through three separate lenses, each lens having a red, blue or green filter over it. For display, the images were shown through a three-lensed projector, again with RBG filters on the lenses. Voilá! A color image. (The process is actually a lot more complicated than that... the website has a more in-depth description.)

Here's just one of the images, a worker on the Mariinski Canal, taken in 1910:

(This is just a thumbnail... the full-size image is so big that I didn't want to link to it here.)

There are several dozen photos in the exhibit, covering all sorts of topics: architecture, transportation, people at work, etc. If you're interested, you can find the exhibit here. You won't be disappointed.