A recent find, on The Big Picture section of the Boston.com website, by ECCG member, Anthony O’Connor, is a selection of colour images from Russia taken in the early 1900s, some of which look like they could have been taken in the early 2000s. The eyeopener is that each image is actually a combination of three b&w images taken quickly using red, green and blue filters in succession, for later projection in near true colour.

This is the blurb on the site:

“With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948”.

Check out the images here.