In the age of Instagram, the work of Sergei Mikhailovich
Prokudin-Gorskii looks utterly contemporary. Never mind that the
chemist-turned-photographer was documenting vanished scenes of
rural agricultural life at the sunset of czarist Russia. The
main subject of his travelogues was color, which he captured in
a palette of saturated blues, searing pinks, and acid yellows.
Nostalgia: The Russian Empire of Czar Nicholas II, published
this month by Gestalten, erases any notion that the past is
always black-and-white. The photographs were recently restored
and digitized by the Library of Congress, which acquired the
images from the photographer’s sons in 1948. In 60-odd years of
storage, some of the plates were cracked or otherwise damaged,
leaving many of the images shot through with great bursts of
color and layered geometric shapes. The archivists chose to
preserve the mistakes, which add an abstract veneer to already
surreally hued scenes and offer clues to Prokudin-Gorskii’s
process. “It’s not about erasing th