Long before the introduction of color film, a Russian chemist and photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky used an innovative technique. He took three individual black and white photos, each through a colored filter (red, green, and blue), to create fully colored, high-quality pictures. The photo of this woman, taken by him, is around 107 years old!
No wait I looked this guy up and this shit’s amazing
It’s so incredibly humanizing to see people from the very distant past in such authentic color
And like. look at these landscape shots!! They’re so vivid!! Even aside from the historical value, these are just legitimately beautiful photographs
You can view the rest of the Prokudin-Gorsky collection (over two thousand photographs!!) on the Library of Congress website.
For example:
- the women holding plates of berries are ethnic Russians near Kirillov
- the family in the field is either Kazakh or Kyrgyz (there’s multiple captions that disagree), photo taken either in Mirzacho'l (in what is now Uzbekistan) or Betpak-Dala (in what is now Kazakhstan)
- the guy in teal with a sword on his lap is Kush-Beggi, Interior Minister of the Emirate of Bukhara
…oh wait, the reblogs are pulling from Wikipedia’s examples from the collection. You can just go read the captions there, much more efficient!
Oh yeah also neat little story I ran into making the above post.
so Wikipedia’s gallery linked above has this image of Greek workers on a tea plantation in Chakva, Georgia:
while randomly browsing the LOC gallery I also found this image (clicked on it because his blue vest caught my eye lol):
The caption is: “Tea factory in Chakva. Chinese foreman Lau-Dzhen-Dzhau”. Same place, maybe the same tea farm!!
Apparently the local climate was a good match for growing tea, so in the late 19th century businessmen imported plants to get the industry going. They also brought in this specific guy (Dutch Wikipedia transliterates his name as Lao Jingzhou) as a tea expert to manage their new enterprise, and he was still around 30-40 years later when Prokudin-Gorsky did his photography tour!
[Also from nl.wikip] Chakva remained a center of tea production throughout the Soviet Union, but the tea industry has since collapsed (I’m guessing post-Soviet globalization makes it easier to import from China/India/SEAsia), and nowadays there’s not much tea farming in the region.
Greeks in Georgia aren’t surprising if you know much about Black Sea history; but I had no idea about the tea industry there. And idk it’s fun to learn about the variety of people brought together for an industry in a particular period of time.
garmbreak1