25 Facts About Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky is best known for his pioneering work in colour photography and his effort to document early 20th-century Russia.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was born in the ancestral estate of Funikova Gora, in the Pokrovsky Uyezd of the Vladimir Governorate.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's parents were of the Russian nobility, and the family had a long military history.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky studied music and painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts.

In 1890, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky married Anna Aleksandrovna Lavrova, and later the couple had two sons, Mikhail and Dmitri, and a daughter, Ekaterina.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky joined Russia's oldest photographic society, the photography section of the IRTS, presenting papers and lecturing on the science of photography.

In 1901, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky established a photographic studio and laboratory in Saint Petersburg.

The Tsar enjoyed the demonstration, and, with his blessing, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky got the permission and funding to document Russia in color.

In 1920, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky remarried and had a daughter with his assistant Maria Fedorovna nee Schedrina.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky set up a photo studio there together with his three adult children, naming it after his fourth child, Elka.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky died in Paris on September 27,1944, a month after the Liberation of Paris.

The method of color photography used by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was first suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and demonstrated in 1861, but good results were not possible with the photographic materials available at that time.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's work gained attention in the 1890s when he exhibited color prints of various subjects such as oil and watercolor paintings, floral studies, and portraits from life.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky presented projected color photographs to the German Imperial Family in 1902 and was exhibiting them to the general public in 1903, when they began to appear in periodicals and books.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky published an illustration of it in Fotograf-Liubitel in 1906.

An inventor as well as a photographer, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky patented an optical system for cameras of the simultaneous-exposure type, and it is often claimed or implied that he invented, or at least built, the camera used for his Russian Empire project.

The lens aperture Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky chose to use greatly affected the exposure time required.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was acquainted with the use of Autochrome color plates, which did not require a special camera or projector.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was one of the favored few the Lumiere Brothers introduced to their new product in 1906, the year before it went into commercial production.

Around 1905, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advances that had been made in color photography to document the Russian Empire systematically.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population.

Some of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's negatives were given away, and some he hid on his departure.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky created 122 color renderings using a method he called digichromatography and commented that each image took him around six to seven hours to align, clean and color-correct.

The photographs have since been the subject of many other exhibitions in the area where Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky took his photos.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky applied algorithms to compensate for the differences between the exposures and prepared color composites of all the negatives in the collection.