Colored pre-revolutionary photographs. Lots of high quality color photos of tsarist russia. Church of st. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Tobolsk

As a director, I am drawn to images. The love for film comes from old black and white films by renowned masters of cinema such as Bergman, Eisenstein, Bunuel, Lang, Dreyer, Ozu and others. For a while in college, I almost felt like a traitor when I watched color movies. But with age came the recognition of color, and now it is difficult for me to stick to a monochrome diet. Life is too brilliant for one tone.

I developed an addiction to researching old photographs of indigenous peoples while working on the film Moses at Mass. This is the story of a German-Jewish immigrant who fell in love with an Acoma girl and became the ruler of her people in New Mexico in the late 1800s.

I looked at black and white photographs of beautiful mysterious people, and I could not believe that someone wanted to destroy them from the continent, conducting a conscious policy for over a hundred years. It seemed so inhuman and barbaric. Digging deeper, I began to find colorized photographs of the first Americans. In them, people came to life even more. Looking at them, I see personalities with royal dignity, who do not differ from the historical portraits of European kings, queens and nobles. Except that they not only display stately regalia, but also strong, natural faces, and not the weak, dry gaze of some of the overseas rulers who led them to death.

Most of the photographs recovered were hand-colored, as color film remained an experimental area until the 1930s. Painting on black and white photographs is an art in itself. Many of the colorized images showcase the talent of photographers who have kept true images of seemingly disappearing people for us. Of course, Native Americans did not disappear despite persistent efforts. They are getting even stronger, but their historical way of life, by and large, can only be found in these photographs.

Here is a collection of colored photographs of Indians. If you like them, you can find more pictures in the historical photo archive at Facebook.
Paul Ratner(Paul Ratner).

Here is the history of these photos. A certain man named Prokudin-Gorsky in 1909-10 came up with the following thing: to photograph objects 3 times through 3 filters - red, green and blue. It turned out 3 black and white photographs. The projection of the three plates had to be simultaneous. He used a small folding camera like the one designed by Adolf Meath. Three exposures of the same object, taken at approximately one second intervals, were required on the same glass plate 84–88 mm wide and 232 mm long. The plate changed position every time, and the image was captured through three different color filters. The subjects to be filmed had to be stationary, which was a big limitation.

The projector has also undergone changes. Prokudin-Gorsky improved the F.E. Iva, created the apparatus according to his own drawings: three diamond-shaped prisms were fastened together, creating one combined prism. Thus, it was possible to focus all three colors on the screen.

The only thing he could do with all this at the time was to insert them into 3 different projectors, with red, green, and blue, respectively, and point the projectors to the same screen. The result was a color image.

He began to actively work on the problems of color cinematography. Keeping in touch with many scientific societies at home and abroad, he traveled with reports to Berlin, London, Rome. He did not forget about the Russian public either.

Back in 1900, he received the Grand Prix at international exhibition in Paris. In 1913, he performed his slide show at the largest cinema in Paris. The success was so great that large foreign companies bombarded him with job offers. But he could not leave Russia: too much was connected with it.

Prokudin-Gorsky in 1909, through the intermediary of the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, who was the Honorary Chairman of the St. Petersburg Photographic Society, receives an audience with Tsar Nicholas II. The Tsar invites Prokudin-Gorsky to perform with a screening of transparencies in front of the Imperial Court in Tsarskoe Selo. When showing, Sergei Mikhailovich had to comment on the pictures, and he did it just dramatically. Towards the end of the demonstration, a delighted whisper was heard in the hall. At the end, the king shook his hand, the empress and the royal children congratulated him on his success.

Then the tsar instructs him to film all sorts of aspects of life in all areas that then made up the Russian Empire. “Although this project seemed very daring, the ultimate goal of Prokudin-Gorsky was to acquaint schoolchildren of Russia with the vast and varied history, culture and modernization of the Empire through his 'optical color projections' (most likely, also to familiarize the heir to the throne with all this).
For this, the photographer was given two special permits, the first said that His Imperial Majesty allows him to stay anywhere, regardless of secrecy, and to photograph even strategically important objects.

The second was a ministerial decree, which announced that the Emperor considered the mission entrusted to Prokudin-Gorsky to be so important that all officials should assist him "anywhere and at any time." For the trip, the photographer was given an assistant on organizational issues and a Pullman carriage, which was specially adapted: a perfectly equipped laboratory was deployed there, including a dark room, so that the development of photographic plates could be carried out even on the road. The carriage accommodated the photographer himself and his assistants, including his 22-year-old son Dmitry. There was hot and cold water, a glacier ... A special vessel and a small sloop with a motor were provided to work on the Mariinsky canal system.

Between 1909 and 1912, and then in 1915, Prokudin-Gorsky surveyed eleven regions of the Russian Empire. The emperor insistently demanded that Prokudin-Gorsky be provided with everything he needed, and even expressed a desire to follow him on one of his future trips. In addition to photographing, Prokudin-Gosrsky gave many lectures illustrating his work.

First official viewing by the king of photographs waterway The Mariinsky Canal and the industrial Urals took place in March 1910; the last exhibition of photographs was opened in March 1918 in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace. (A detailed biography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky can be found).

The old lady. General form with the Volga:

(At first I had this photo, it is in a larger shot, it is very impressive, but already in advance ... we knocked ...)

Prokudin-Gorsky managed to leave for the revolution, and he managed to take with him 20 boxes of photographic plates, only about a thousand photographs - with the exception of photographs of strategically important objects and photographs of the royal family confiscated from him (he managed to take with him only one photo of the young tsarevich). Color photographs of the royal family may have remained somewhere in our archives. The equipment and the projector could not be collected.

In emigration, the goal of Prokudin-Gorsky - to reveal the benefits of color photography for education and science - remained unchanged. In England, he patented the development of an optical system for a movie camera. To test it, he moved to Nice in 1922, where, together with the Lumière brothers, he opened a photographic laboratory.

In 1948, after his death, his son in Paris sold these records to the American Library of Congress. It turned out to be very difficult to turn them into regular color images due to the fact that most of them had non-trivial spatial discrepancy between the three color versions. So they lay still until recently. And suddenly it occurred to some library official: they also need to be scanned, loaded into Adobe photoshop and there combine the contours of the three color options. So they did it, and were amazed: the world, long gone, and known only from bad black-and-white photographs, suddenly rebelled in all its colors ...

Perm:

If you want to try to find familiar places or hometown in this archive, then it is most convenient to use a special search: you enter any word in the window (for example, Volga), and you get the desired result. For each photo there is an uncompressed tif version (up to 50 mb). The smallest details can be seen on it.

To view an enlarged (about 4 times) version of this photo, it is enough to replace the letter "r" with "v" before the last point of the copied address. The resolution of these images is such that the image quality will not deteriorate. In order to get the largest version in .tif format, substitute "u.tif" instead of "r.jpg" in the address. But it will take a very long time to load :)

I don’t know about you, but my photographs evoke a feeling not only of harmony and some special solidity of THAT Russian life, but also of the incredible power and vitality of Russia at that time ... In all cities and villages, something is being repaired, erected, under construction, electric poles have already been built everywhere, wires have been laid ...

modern look of this temple

The old road to Moscow. Rzhev city:

General view of Belozersk from the rampart:

Ryazan. View from the bell tower of the Assumption Cathedral:

Ryazan. General view from the north:

Ryazan. Southeast view:

Ekaterinburg. General view of the southern part:

Ekaterinburg. General view of the central part:

Factory settlements of the Verkh-Isetsky plant (Yekaterinburg)

Place of the former throne in the temporary canvas. churches of the musketeer regiment (Yekaterinburg)

Refectory and Church of the Sorrowful Mother of God in the monastery (Tikhvin monastery) Yekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg city. General view of the northern part

Yekaterinburg city. Observatory on Bald Mountain:

Planing machine of the Imperial Lapidary Factory. Ekaterinburg:

This is the same place in our time

View of the Zlatoust plant. In the distance, Mount Taganay:

General view of Perm from city slides:

View of Perm from the railway bridge over the Kama:

View of the Church of St. George. Staraya Ladoga:

Torzhok. View from the west side:

Torzhok. View of the city from the north:

View from the rampart to Torzhok:

Torzhok. Camp and barracks:

Torzhok. Borisoglebsky monastery from the bridge:

The city of Smolensk. View from the bell tower of the Assumption Cathedral:

The city of Polotsk.

View of the Kamensk iron-smelting plant:

Rostov the Great. Gymnasium Kekin:

General view of Rostov from the bell tower of the All Saints Church:

General view of the city of Kirillov from the bell tower of the Kazan Cathedral:

View of Suzdal along the Kamenka River:

Compare with modern photo the same area can be

Vladimir city:

Suzdal. View from the bell tower of the Monastery of the Robe:

View of the trans-river part of Tyumen from the monastery:

Tobolsk:

View of Tobolsk from the Assumption Cathedral:

Cherdyn:

Blast furnaces at the Satka plant:

View of the city of Kineshma from the east:

At the hayfield near the halt. Russian empire.

Three generations. Andrey Petrov Kalganov (photographer's note: former foreman of the plant. He was 55 years old in the service. He had the good fortune to bring bread and salt to His Imperial Majesty), his son and his granddaughter. The last two work in the workshops of the Zlatoust plant:

Staritsa town. Trans-Volga side.

The Moscow River from the Ferapontovsky Monastery. Near Mozhaisk:

Olonchanian type:

Dairy in Dagomys:

School in the village of Perguba:

Old boyar carriage "radka":

Old sledges of the 18th century:

Peasant hut in the village of Martyanova:

Construction of a lock near the village of Kuzminsky on the Oka:

Sawmill on the Oka River:

Dam construction (Beloomut):

Oka River. Engine room:

Log sawing:

Dam construction works:

Cherdyn city:

In the city of Zlatoust:

North-western part of the city of Zlatoust:

Stone dredging machine:

Alexandrov. General view of the Trinity Monastery:

Torzhok. View of the city from the east:

Mill and dam on the Polotye river:

Peasants on the mow:

View of the new Ladoga:

Dvinsk city:

Kasli settlements with a lake:

Rzhev city:

Water pumping pumps:

General view of the northwestern part of Smolensk:

Church of st. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Tobolsk:

Cordon (gatehouse) in the forest:

Drying nets on Lake Karjakino:

Vitebsk:

Monks at work. Planting potatoes:

The hut of the settler Artemy, nicknamed the Cat, who has lived in this place for over 40 years:

And in this photo the film crew themselves:

I bring almost all the captions to the photographs in their original form, no gag.

In general, the idea was brilliant. Interesting: they all fully understood WHAT they were doing for us? ..
I also thought: it would be nice if a rich man could be found, allocated funds and persuaded an experienced photographer (say, paszec ) take a ride along the same route, take pictures of the same places, and put the photos next to each other!

Even then, three years ago, looking at these photos, I was amazed at the integrity, serenity and strength that is spilled there. It was felt that the entire Russian life of that time was permeated with the spirit of some kind of unity. And so, I wanted to somehow express this spirit in words.
And only now, having returned to these photos, I understood what this calmness is talking about; what does it mean:
"Master of the house".

For those who really liked:

All photos - both presented on this page, and the continuation can be downloaded in PDF-files at the following links:
Part one

Probably, many who saw these photos were visited by the same idea that it would be nice to organize a site where old photos of Prokudin-Gorsky would be posted, and next to them - photos of the same area, but in our time. This work has already begun. On the website of the project "Russian Empire in Color" (http://www.veinik.by/) it is planned to upload modern photographs of objects that were photographed by Prokudin-Gorsky. Now we are collecting materials.
A request to those who have them, post it in my comments or write to the guestbook of the specified project (http://www.veinik.by/guestBook.htm).
* * *

We offer a selection of interesting and rare old photographs that will help you travel back in time.

James Cameron is resting on the set of "Titanic"

Beach at the Peter and Paul Fortress, Leningrad, 1970s

Stele about the stay of I.V. Stalin in Polyarny, 1940s

Street trade on Kalinina Avenue in Moscow, early 90s

Experimental Soviet taxi, 1964

Pitsunda, 1982

In an advertising photo of British Petroleum gas stations, Swedish Air Force personnel with military base F-16 Uppsala refuel and maintain the SAAB 105 trainer jet. 80s

Kiosk with ice cream and milkshakes, 1964, Moscow

Watering tram, 1990, Leningrad

Nirvana for Halloween, 1993, Akron, Ohio, USA
Left to right: Kurt Cobain, Big John Duncan, Pat Smear, Krist Novoselic.

Smoker, 1964, Letterwood

Girl and Dogs, 1977, Miami, USA

Meeting of Henry Kissinger with Dolly Parton, 1985, USA

Search for wives. 1901, Montana

After the landing of the five thousandth assault force of the southern coalition, 40-45 kilometers north of the city on October 20, 1950, the capital of the DPRK fell.
In the photo - interrogation by the military police South Korea North Korean prisoners of war.

The disguise of the Taj Mahal mausoleum-mosque during the third Indo-Pakistani war in December 1971, as a result of which East Pakistan (Bangladesh) gained independence.

Dosimetric control of Chernobyl NPP employees, 1990, USSR
All employees of the station, and especially the 4th unit, were required to undergo a special radiation test upon leaving work. If the employee was not “clean” enough, the red signal came on and the turnstile did not work. Then it was necessary to return and once again wash in the shower, applying "RADEZ"
Photographer Victoria Ivleva

Father and son serve water in a rice field, 1952, Vietnam

Four women captured by the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising are photographed through barbed wire at the Stalag VI-C camp after their liberation. Third Reich. April 1945.

Fighter MiG-15 of the USSR Air Force in battle. DPRK. 1950-1953.

Winners of the 15th bicycle race Around the Kremlin dedicated to Soviet youth. Moscow. RSFSR. THE USSR. 1979 year.

Vatican Women's Rifle Team. Vatican. Kingdom of Italy. 1937 year.

Tanks in the central square of the city during the Romanian Revolution. Bucharest. 1989

Parade on Red Square on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. RSFSR. THE USSR. November 1927.

Albert Einstein with his wife Elsa, Grand Canyon, 1931

Sylvester Stallone, 1979

The girl says goodbye to a soldier leaving for war. London, 1940

3-year-old girl with a pony, 1955

Schoolchildren are assembling machines, Stalinsk (Novokuznetsk), 1943

Yuri Nikulin before the commencement of the anniversary evening, 1991.

City Defender. Stalingrad, USSR. January 1943.

Sir Thomas Lipton is the inventor of Lipton tea bags.

Library in Prague Castle, 1950.

Film crew and actors of the film "Back to the Future", USA, 1985.

Tennis players, 1964

L. Kuravlev and N. Varley on the set of the film "Viy".

Elizabeth Birdm is the first female motorcyclist to travel around the world.

Leonid Gaidai on the set of the film "Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession", 1973

Soviet servicemen inspect a German carriage of a 240-mm gun carriage, manufactured by the Skoda company, captured in the Krasnoye Selo area.
The German designation for the gun is 24 cm Kanone M.16 (t). Such guns were in service with the 2nd Division of the 84th Artillery Regiment (II./AR 84), which participated in the shelling of Leningrad.

Princess Diana, 1960s

"Moskvich 408" right-hand drive (export).

William Joyce, better known as "Lord Howe Howe," was supervised by armed guards to prevent his escape. He was captured at his home in Germany in May 1945.
Joyce William is one of the leaders of the British Nazis.
In May 1945 he was arrested by the British authorities. Convicted by a British court of war crimes and sentenced to death. Executed.

Civilians greet Soviet soldiers on a captured German Pz.Kpfw.III tank.

Retreating Germans blow up a bridge in Florence. Italy, 1944.

Container for holy relics from Basel Cathedral. 1450s.

Hit of a German aerial bomb on the cruiser "Chervona Ukraine", Sevastopol 11/12/1941
German aerial photography during a raid on November 12, 1941.
The cruiser, standing at the Grafskaya pier in Sevastopol, received two hits from bombs during the raid, which claimed the lives of about seventy sailors and caused serious damage to the ship, from which it sank the next day.

1943 year. North Africa. Wounded before being loaded onto a heavy German transport plane Messerschmitt Me.323D-8 "Gigant" in Tunisia.

Finnish soldiers at the booked steam locomotive. Interesting is the construction of the pipe, apparently it was done in order to direct the smoke to the ground, excluding the unmasking of the armored train from behind it.

Patrol of the Italian People's Militia on a street in Milan. April 26, 1945

Hero Soviet Union and Hero Russian Federation doctor medical sciences Lieutenant Colonel Polyakov (spent the longest time in space in one flight - 437 days) watches the approach of the shuttle "Discovery" through the window. Research orbital station Mir, February 3, 1995.

Napoleon Bonaparte's three-barreled 120-caliber pocket pistol, inlaid with gold, presented to him in 1802.

Chechen fighters in Grozny. 90s

THE USSR. Moscow. Bath bus, transferred to the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions of the sponsored division. Photo of the beginning. 1940s

RF. "Penthouse" №1

THE USSR. Moscow. Sale of Brazilian oranges. 1962

Popeye 1940s

TV factory. East Germany. 1954

Cinema in flight. USA 60s

Russian artist Ilya Glazunov - paints a portrait of Gina Lollobrigida. Rome 1963

Vincent Spano, Isabella Rossellini & Monica Bellucci by Steven Meisel 1992

Fashionable glasses. 1960

Bosniaks in Sarajevo read a report on the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary., 1908.
Six years later, at the same place, the Serbian student Gavrila Princip will shoot the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand

A ship control simulator in a navigation school. Glasgow, 1913.

Soviet press 1924:
"Comrade. Lunion, a member of the V Congress of the Comintern, a representative of the most oppressed, most enslaved part of the working people - French colonial blacks - rests on ... the ancient throne of the Russian tsars, preserved as a museum exhibit in the Kremlin. Now this is an ordinary chair. "

London after the Luftwaffe raid, view from St. Paul's Cathedral, January 3, 1941.

French actor Jean Gabin on the porch of his house, France, December 1949.

Underwater wedding, San Marcos, Texas, USA, 1954.

Portrait of Woodrow Wilson, 1918.

Soldiers of the army of Admiral Kolchak pose near the bodies of the shot Bolsheviks, 1919.

On April 26-30, 1991, Cyclone Marian passed in Bangladesh (maximum damage: April 29th) - 138,000 deaths.

Marlon Brando with a cat.

"Dubinushka". USSR, 1931.

Grigory Alexandrov, Sergey Eisenstein, Walt Disney and cameraman Edward Tisse.

Girls playing strip cards, 1941.

Woody Allen and Michael Jackson at Studio 54, New York, 1977.

Stalin (third from left) with a group of Bolshevik revolutionaries in Turukhansk, Russian Empire, 1915.

In April 1945, in the Gardelegen concentration camp, the SS men drove about 1,100 prisoners into a barn and set them on fire. Some of the victims tried to escape, but were shot and killed by the guards.

Notes from the newspaper "Stalin's Way" dated August 15, 1935.

Eiffel Tower, July 1888.

Taxi stand at the Bolshoi Theater. Moscow, 1935.
Photographer: Arkady Shaikhet.

Medal for drunkenness: Collar with a cast-iron star with the inscription "For drunkenness". Russia, first half of the 18th century, cast iron, casting, iron, forging.

John Lennon / John Lennon

A group of Taganskaya prison inmates return from a morning performance at the Bolshoi Theater, which they attended as a reward for their exemplary behavior, 1902.

The earliest known photograph of the Chernobyl disaster, April 26, 1986.

Led Zeppelin, 1969.
Photographer: Ron Raffaelli.

This is exactly what the ideal female figure looked like in 1938, according to LIFE magazine. The 20-year-old model June Cox was captured as an “ideal” - height is about 168 cm, weight is 56 kg.

Only nudists here were not enough for us. Photographer Zenon Zhiburtovich, "Ogonyok" N21, 1987.

Cheat sheets. Moscow State University, 1984.
Photographer: Valery Khristoforov.

X-ray installation, Frankfurt, 1929.

A Turk washes his feet for a final prayer while Bulgarian soldiers prepare a gallows for him, 1913.

T-54 crushes the bus which the protesters have blocked the passage. Operation Danube, 1968.

RSO or Raupenschlepper Ost is a full-track multipurpose tractor, originally used by the Wehrmacht troops on the Eastern Front, at the end of the war - on all fronts.
The study of the very sad experience of using German wheeled, tracked and half-tracked vehicles during the 1941-1942 campaign on the Eastern Front led the specialists of the Steyr company to the idea of ​​the need to create a simple in design and reliable artillery tractor with a purely tracked chassis. Taking as a basis the layout diagram of the Soviet transport tractors STZ-5 and Stalinets-2, which were captured by German troops in the summer of 1941, they had already prepared a draft of such a tractor by the middle of 1942.

Donetsk airport, 1976.

Dali on the Playboy photo shoot. 1973

Uma Thurman. 1991

1954 year. Simone Silva and Robert Mitchum.
When Simone posed topless, she provoked a crush in which one photographer broke his arm and the other broke his leg. She was asked to leave the festival.

Soldiers of the Warsaw Pact countries, 1980s
There are seven flags (Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Romania, USSR, Czechoslovakia), and initially there were eight countries in the Warsaw Pact, including Albania, but Albania actually withdrew from the bloc in 1968 - after the introduction of ATS troops into Czechoslovakia.

Inmate in a French prison, 1900s. Mustache tattooed in protest against the administration.

Pouring of the 30s of the USSR

Aeroflot advertising booklet for foreigners in 1967, advertising flights on the route New York-Moscow and Moscow-Tokyo. With an indication of the rates for the first and tourist class, as well as the promise of "real Russian cuisine" with black caviar and "the best vodka".

Hungry prisoners, almost starving to death, used for "scientific" experiments. Concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria.
The camp was liberated on May 7, 1945.

Late 40s, Chelyabinsk region, USSR. Sherman tank plows instead of a tractor

The demarcation line between the western Muslim and eastern Christian parts of Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. 1983 year.

American gunners. Live collage on the occasion of the victory in the First World War, Germany, 1918.

Female soldiers of the Red Guard in Finnish captivity, Finland, 1918.

Visit of the American President to Australia.
On October 21, 1966, two brothers bombarded the limousine that was carrying Lyndon Johnson on a state visit to Australia with paint balloons. So they expressed their protest against the Vietnam War.

American officers drink at Hitler's private residence in Bavaria, in the Alps, on May 8, 1945.

Before tablets and laptops, Paris, 1947.

Book-shaped container for poisons, 17th century.

"Barrel cleaning" of the main battery (15-inch) British battleship HMS Royal Oak, 1916.

The dance of fidelity is a ritual dance symbolizing the dancer's devotion to the country's leader Mao Zedong, 1967.

Currency traders near the shop "Berezka" 80s

The boy is holding a poster "All I want for Christmas is a clean white school."
- protests after black girl Ruby Bridges first started attending white school, New Orleans, 1960.

Invoice for the repair of a Renault car that belonged to Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich. Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich is the son of his full namesake, known as "KR". In 1918 he was killed by the Bolsheviks. He was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church abroad.

And also the names of the rivers flowing through the territory of Moscow:
Bloodworm, Beggar woman, Samotyga, Ulcer, Fever, Wild boar, Zhabenka, Cockroach, Chernushka, Rotten. There was also Sukovo (Sukino) swamp, and Clean ponds called the Filthy