4/8 Moment of Zen: Color Photos of Imperial Russia

These Photos are 100 Years Old

Seriously. Taken at the beginning of the 20th century by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, official photographer to Russia's last tsar, Tsar Alexander II, they survey wide swaths of the empire from Russian peasants dressed up in their finest to monuments of Central Asian architecture to the railroad as it cut through the expansive empire, making it accessible as it never had been before.

Also remarkable about Prokudin-Gorskii's photos is that they were, for all intents and purposes, taken before the advent of color film. Each color image is composed of shots from three independent lenses, each with a different color filter on it. These three images were overlaid to create a single, colored image. Click the picture to go to the front page of the gallery at the Library of Congress website or click here to read more about his color photography technique.