The photograph above depicts Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, higher identified within the English-speaking world as Leo Tolstoy. It dates from 1908, when he had almost all his work behind him: the foremost novels Struggle and Peace and Anna Karenina, in fact, but additionally the acclaimed late ebook The Demise of Ivan Ilyich. His personal demise, in truth, lay not rather more than two years earlier than him. (See footage of the ultimate days of his life right here.) This didn’t supply a lot of a window of alternative to the chemist Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who had not too long ago developed a pictures course of that might seize the nice man of letters in “true shade” — and who understood that such a portrait would rating a promotional coup for his innovation.
“After a few years of labor, I’ve now achieved wonderful ends in producing correct colours,” Prokudin-Gorsky wrote to Tolstoy early that very same yr. “My coloured projections are identified in each Europe and in Russia. Now that my technique of pictures requires not more than 1 to three seconds, I’ll enable myself to ask your permission to go to for one or two days (preserving in thoughts the state of your well being and climate) to be able to take a number of shade images of you and your partner.” After receiving that permission, Prokudin-Gorsky spent two days at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s household property, the place he took shade footage of not simply the person himself however his working quarters and the encompassing grounds.
“Just a few months later, in its August 1908 situation, The Proceedings of the Russian Technical Society ran the next announcement describing ‘the primary Russian shade photoportrait,’ a shade {photograph} of L. N. Tolstoy,” in response to Tolstoy Research Journal. The ensuing fame drew Prokudin-Gorsky an invite to point out his work to Tsar Nicholas II, who subsequently furnished him with the assets to spend ten years photographically documenting Russia in shade. “To today, no person is aware of precisely what digital camera Prokudin-Gorsky used,” writes Kai Bernau at Phrases that Work, “but it surely was possible a big wood digital camera with a particular holder for a sliding glass adverse plate, taking three sequential monochrome images, every by a distinct coloured filter.” This seems to be a technological descendant of the method developed within the early eighteen-sixties by Scottish physicist-poet James Clerk Maxwell, creator of the primary shade {photograph} in historical past.
To view that {photograph}, Maxwell “projected the three slides utilizing three completely different projectors, every affixed with the identical shade filter that had been used to provide the slide.” Prokudin-Gorsky, too, needed to venture his photographs, although he did later make shade prints; “he additionally revealed it, in important numbers, as a collectible postcard,” says Tolstoy Research Journal, including that the model seen here’s a scan of 1 such postcard. “How precisely a lithographed copy just like the one above of Tolstoy represents the ‘actual’ colours of Prokudin-Gorsky’s authentic projected picture is debatable”; the essential technological distinction between “subtractive” lithography and “additive’ projection signifies that we will’t be seeing fairly the identical image of Tolstoy that the Tsar did — however then, it’s a great a likeness of him as we’re ever going to get.
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The Very Final Days of Leo Tolstoy Captured on Video
Tsarist Russia Involves Life in Vivid Shade Images Taken Circa 1905-1915
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embody the Substack publication Books on Cities, the ebook The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The Metropolis in Cinema. Comply with him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.
