This is not only a remarkable photographic record, color images made before WWW I, but it is a window on another world. I often link to sites with old photographs. Photographs of worlds that no longer exist. These worlds are more than people that dress in funny clothes. Everything in those worlds was different. When I look at old photographs I try to imagine those worlds — worlds without electricity, without flush toilets, without SUVs, without weapons of mass destruction.

The Empire That Was Russia
The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated

Jewish Children with their Teacher

The photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world--the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution. His 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.

In the early 1900s Prokudin-Gorskii formulated an ambitious plan for a photographic survey of the Russian Empire that won the support of Tsar Nicholas II. Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, he completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation.

Tea Weighing Station

  thanks to Solipsistic