Background

Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was born on August 30, 1863, in Murom, Vladimir, Russian Federation. His parents were of the Russian nobility, and the family had a long military history.

Education

Sergey Mikhaylovich enrolled in Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology to study chemistry under Dmitri Mendeleev. He also studied music and painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts.

Career

After his schooling the scientist went abroad, lecturing at a technical school in Germany and continuing his work in chemistry at the laboratory of Edme Jules Maumene, who was doing research in color photography.

In 1901, Sergey Mikhaylovich established a photography studio and laboratory in Saint Petersburg. He returned to Russia to teach photography and do photographic research, and from 1906 to 1910 he edited and contributed to Fotograf-Liubitel. In order to best show his laboriously produced positive slides, he designed his own projector, which could house 3-color separations and project them simultaneously. With the support of the czar, Sergey Mikhaylovich was provided with a specially modified Pullman railroad car and given permission to travel freely and use whatever official assistance was available; so equipped, he set out to document his country. From 1909 to 1914 he traveled thousands of miles by tram and boat to do so, but after the revolution in 1917, he and his family emigrated to the West.

A straight documentarian, Sergey Mikhaylovich worked with a small folding camera. Though most of his surviving work is scenic and architectural, he also made portraits and genre studies.

In the 1930s, the elderly Sergey Mikhaylovich continued with lectures showing his photographs of Russia to young Russians in France, but stopped commercial work and left the studio to his children, who named it Gorsky Frères.

Sergey Mikhaylovich died in Paris on September 27, 1944, a month after the Liberation of Paris. He is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery.

Works

More photos

• Other Work

  • Lithograph print of Leo Tolstoy in front of Prokudin-Gorsky's camera in Yasnaya Polyana, 1908

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Arthur Goldsmith (Camera Arts, Nov/Dec 1980) writes that "the photographer's 2,000 surviving images offer, in gentle colors, nostalgic as a half-forgotten dream... the beautiful surface of Imperial Russia in the days of the Tsar: its rivers, hamlets, churches, peasants, and exotic comers. His work is a Russian Easter egg of visual delight."

Connections

In 1890, Sergey Mikhaylovich married Anna Aleksandrovna Lavrova, and later the couple had two sons, Mikhail and Dmitri, and a daughter, Ekaterina. In 1920, he remarried and had a daughter with his assistant Maria Fedorovna née Schedrimo.

Spouse:

Anna Aleksandrovna Lavrova

Anna Aleksandrovna was the daughter of the Russian industrialist Aleksandr Stepanovich Lavrov, an active member of the Imperial Russian Technical Society (IRTS).

Spouse:

Shchedrimo Maria Fedorovna

Son:

Mikhail

(b. 1895)

Son:

Dmitri

(b. 1892)

Daughter:

Ekaterina

(b.1893)

Daughter:

Elena

(b. 1920)

teacher:

D. I. Mendeleev

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii studied at Institute of Applied Technology until 1889 under famed chemist D. I. Mendeleev.

coworker:

Edme Jules Maumene

References

• Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky At the turn of the twentieth century, the photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky undertook a quest to document an empire that was undergoing rapid change due to industrialization and the building of railroads. Between 1903 and 1916 Prokudin-Gorsky, who developed a pioneering method of capturing color images on glass plates, scoured the Russian Empire with the patronage of Nicholas II. Intrepidly carrying his cumbersome and awkward camera from the western borderlands over the Volga River to Siberia and Central Asia, he created a singular record of Imperial Russia. In 1918 Prokudin-Gorsky escaped an increasingly chaotic, violent Russia and regained nearly 2,000 of his bulky glass negatives. His subsequent peripatetic existence before settling in Paris makes his collection's survival all the more miraculous. The U.S. Library of Congress acquired Prokudin-Gorsky's collection in 1948, and since then it has become a touchstone for understanding pre-revolutionary Russia. Now digitized and publicly available, his images are a sensation in Russia, where people visit websites dedicated to them. William Craft Brumfield - photographer, scholar, and the leading authority on Russian architecture in the West - began working with Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs in 1985. He curated the first public exhibition of them in the United States and has annotated the entire collection. In Journeys through the Russian Empire, Brumfield - who has spent decades traversing Russia and photographing buildings and landscapes in their various stages of disintegration or restoration - juxtaposes Prokudin-Gorsky's images against those he took of the same buildings and areas. In examining the intersections between his own photography and that of Prokudin-Gorsky, Brumfield assesses the state of preservation of Russia's architectural heritage and calls into question the nostalgic assumptions of those who see Prokudin-Gorsky's images as the recovery of the lost past of an idyllic, pre-Soviet Russia.
  2020
• Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, a chemist as well as a photographer, developed one of the earliest processes for taking color pictures and was the editor for many years of a St. Petersburg journal, The Amateur Photographer. During the six years he executed the Tsar's commission, he traveled vast distances in a special railway car outfitted with a darkroom - to the Urals, the Caucasus, Ukraine, Siberia, Finland, and as far east as Turkestan. Eminent in his own country, he became one of the countless emigres to flee Russia in 1918, disappearing into relative obscurity in Norway, and later in England and France. Like imperial society, he too was a victim of the upheaval of the Revolution. Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky managed to bring out of Russia his collection of nearly 2000 glass-plate negatives. This book, produced with the cooperation of the Library of Congress, contains 120 of his finest color photographs - including the only extant photo in color of Leo Tolstoy.
  1980
• Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: Photographing The Russian Empire (Photography Pioneers) (Volume 1) Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was born in the Russian Empire in 1863. His privileged upbringing and endlessly curious mind would lead him to study chemistry, painting, and music in St Petersburg. He would use his abilities in the new and developing field of photography to document life around the enormous Empire of the Tsar. His goal was to collect pictures of everyday life around his beloved homeland that would serve as proof of its incredible breadth, variety, beauty, and resiliency. This book collects the magnificent photographs he took while traveling around Russia and Europe. They reflect the nuanced and carefully crafted undertaking of a sensible and capable artist whose intention was to educate the masses about the beauty and diversity of his nation by producing gorgeous and endearing images.
  2017