A Fascination with Historic Color Photos

“Historic color photos from Tsarist times,” read the Seattle Post-Intelligencer headline.

I read the article with interest. I’d always been a Russophile.

An art museum in Seattle held an exhibit many years ago of work by “the photographer to the Tsar,” Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. It featured several dozen color photos from the early 1900s.

Not an historic old photo–but Ypres all the same (Unsplash by Stijn Swinnen)

I’d never seen anything like them in those long ago pre-Internet days.

We decided to visit the museum

Photographers have taken photographs in color for a long time, of course, but it was an expensive process.

Some photos were hand tinted–my mother-in-law did that in the WWII years.

Others used a complicated process I won’t attempt to explain.

But those photos hung in the Seattle gallery were the original ones, found somewhere and displayed for the first time.

I walked among them marveling. They transported me back in time, far from Washington and the three boys trailing after me.

Several stand out all these years later.

One was of the colorful cupolas of the Moscow kremlin.

Certainly, I’d seen plenty of photos of that structure, I didn’t need to be reminded of their colors.

But the photographer took the historic color photo while Nicholas II sat on the throne. I could view the church as he saw it 100 years before.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii (Wikimedia Commons)

Beautiful. Totally unique and unusual.

I saw a green hillside of grass with a sheep herder, the crenelated walls of a city in the distance.

A trio of rabbis, replete with curls and head garments mingled with their long dark robes.

They lived and breathed before my eyes, seemingly, on that wall.

It all seemed different, somehow, to know someone had worked the bulky camera, hauled the plates and developed the glass plates in a dark room.

Historic color photos are common on the Internet today.

But a post on Facebook last week reminded me yet again of the fascination.

I paged through them, enthralled all over again.

As an historical fiction writer, along with being a biographer, I pour over old photos all the time, trying to grasp what life was like.

In Bored Panda’s photos, I recognize the grinding poverty of Ireland–notice few of the children wear shoes.

I’m surprised–and I laugh at the realization–that flowers looked the same 100 years ago. I recognize daisies and iris!

The hats, the ruffles on the clothing, the buttons in place of zippers– from them I learn what clothing looked like.

By Paul Castelnau (Wikipedia Commons)

Because I wrote a World War I novel, I’ve used Pinterest to catalog photographs of the era.

Pinterest and a Facebook group led me to colorized photos from the Great War.

It’s so much more poignant to see blue uniforms, colorful flowers and the dreadful mud covering the landscape as far as I can see.

As we dig into archives world-wide, all manner of fascinating photography turns up.

Viewing the past through the window of today is the best use I’ve found for the Internet.

How about a video of the Russian tsar?

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