Quite a lots of the Prokudin-Gorsky images have a kind of postcard quality to them. This is unsurprising I suppose since he saw his task as one of documenting Russia - particularly provincial Russia - while at the same time refining his three-colour photographic technique. It is worth outlining this technique in order to get a sense of how hard it is and how accomplished Prokudin-Gorsky was at it.
Our old friend Wikipedia summarises the technique accurately and reasonably concisely:
The photographer takes three sequential photographs in black and white with the use of three color filters: cyan, magenta and yellow. The union of the three photographic negatives, developed in the chromatic scales corresponding to the color filter used, gives rise to surprisingly saturated color photographs and realistic. The main difficulty of this technique is the necessary immobility of the subject being filmed, so the movement of the person portrayed can create colored halos unreal. The birth of modern color photography - that has made this technique obsolete - is dated from 1935 when the Kodak and Agfa invent emusioni Kodachrome and Agfacolor Neue. These films, just like the ones currently in production, contain within them the three emulsion layers sensitive to different light spectra
Given that Prokudin-Gorsky was so interested in the three-colour process, it is unsurprising that at least some of his photographs display an awareness of what colour might add to photographic image making. Consider, for example:
The blocks of bright colour from the brightly coloured fabrics are perfectly foregrounded against the neutral-toned bleached wood - and offset all the more by being placed against the horizontal lines of the wood (though notice the way the middle girl is framed in the middle of the door). As is often the case with early photographic techniques that requires the subject matter to be very still for a long time, the faces and postures are enigmatic. Lifelike, but un-animated.
So many of Prokudin-Gorsky's images make use of the colourful fabrics within the dress (one gets the sense it is not the everyday dress) of the provincial Russians. Here are two more examples:
My sense is that Prokudin-Gorsky did manage to make interesting use of colour within his photography by making the colours that adorn or fill the lives of the population he was documenting part of his subject matter. Part of what he is documenting is an account of the place of colour in the lives of the provincial Russian, and that adds something quite compelling to his images. Likewise, his landscape images seem to me at least to be explorations of a coloured environment, rather than merely explorations of an environment that happens to appear in colour. How about this for example:
Here are a couple more of people in more or less colourful clothing against more of less colourful or neutral backdrops.
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