In the early 1900s, Russian chemist and photographer Sergei
Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii conducted a photographic survey of
the Russian Empire. Between 1909 and 1915 he captured images
from eleven regions of, what is otherwise, a thinly documented
area of the world. What makes the images so unique is that he
photographed them using an elaborate system that allowed him to
reproduce the final images in color. What I find instructive is
how eerie they seem. Though they were taken 100 years ago, these
vivid, high resolution photographs of people and places look as
if they were taken on a movie set last week. Eerie, perhaps,
because I'm just not used to seeing images from this long ago in
natural color and my brain has a hard time finding them
believable. It's somewhat analogous to how the filtering effects
applied to Instagram images inflence our perception of
photographs folks are taking today. In that case, the effects
remove the images from reality. (In case you're interested,
here's a look at some new filter