Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II

By Robert H. Allshouse

Book Overview

Dust jacket notes: "The photographs in this extraordinary book are the work of a previously unknown pioneer in early 20th century photography, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii -- commissioned by... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803769962
• ISBN13: 9780803769960
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Dial Press
• Weight: 3.28 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Gorgeous Photographs

If you are interested in history at all, this book will be quite a find. The photographs, beautiful and presented in color, are from the turn of the century before the Russian Empire fell. The pictures capture a time, place and spirit. It is spectacular to see.

Fascinating

I came across this book many years ago in a bookstore and bought it immediately. Always interested in Russian history, this was a fascinating glimpse into the past for me. As the previous reviewer said, its like the pictures were taken yesterday. Well worth the price for someone interested in this period of history.(I think I paid $35 for it new, a tidy sum for a book then)

The way they were...

If you landed here through a title or subject search, you've probably already seen this book in the library. You have my sympathy on learning that it is out of print. (If you came here through my personal page, I'm flattered!) This is a book of photographs of Russia from the decade before World War I. Thing is, these are mostly _color_ pictures. This early color process produced images that are about as good as the color photos in the Sunday newspaper today. The photographer, S. M. Prokudin-Gorskii, showed the images in the form of a slide show to Tsar Nikolai II, in hopes of having similar exhibitions in Russian schools. The subject matter is fairly prosaic. The images are postcard views of rustic villages, broad rivers, wooden dams, happy peasants at work and at leisure, exotic Caucasian and central Asian tribespeople in colorful native dress, lots of onion-domed churches and shrines. Prokudin-Gorskii meant these pictures to show the pageantry and glory of Mother Russia. Today, they are painful reminders of a world that has been smashed forever. The peasants would die in the Great War, or starve in the postwar famines, or butcher each other in the Civil War, or be executed in the Red Terror. The public works would go to ruin due to the incompetence of the commissars who would run them after the bourgeois engineers had been eliminated. The colorful tribespeople would be exiled. The churches would be looted and demolished. The peaceful meadows would be paved over by ill-conceived, gigantic heavy industrial plants. The villages would be burned by civil war and foreign invasions. Seeing all these images which look like they were taken yesterday, and knowing the fate that awaited their subjects, is quite an experience. Contrast this book to another book of pre-war Russian color photographs, _Leonid Andreyev, Photographs of a Russian Writer_. His vision is much more personal, but no less poignant.