Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian chemist and photographer, a disciple of Dmitry Mendeleev, who devoted his career to the advancement of photography and film. He was born in Fúnikova Gorá, Vladimir Governorate in 1863. He studied with famous scientists in St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris, where he developed the techniques necessary for the first colour photographs. In 1900, the Russian Technical Society presented his black-and-white photographs at the Universal Exhibition in Paris.

His research resulted in the first patents for colour positive film and motion projection film. Around 1905, Prokudin-Gorsky conceived the grand project of documenting, with colour photographs, the enormous diversity of history, culture and progress of the Russian Empire, to be used in the empire's schools.

 

His process used a camera that took a series of monochrome photos in very rapid sequence, each through a different colour filter. By projecting the three monochrome photos with the appropriate coloured light, it was possible to reconstruct the scene in the original colours. However, there was no mechanism for making prints of the images thus obtained.

In 1918, Prokudin-Gorsky left Russia. After learning of the death of the Tsar and his family, he settled in Paris, where he died in 1944.

The history of images is also the history of their supports: glass, paper, acetate or liquid screen. The technical difficulty of fixing photographs on a surface seems to persist in the phantasmatic character of the latent image and the current digital image. The work we have rescued in this issue belongs to The Memory of Colour and its Technical Reproducibility. In the persistence, in the uneasiness of writing the colour of light through its shadow.