The Empire That Was

I just found a Library of Congress exhibit of photos, The Empire That Was Russia, composed of the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer to the Tsar.

Yes, these are from the old Russian Empire.

I found them through a google search and it took me a while to realize that these images are nearly 100 years old because the colorization on them is fabulous. They actually look better than many color photos from the Soviet era (their film and chemicals produced famously bright blues that made everything surreal).

Check these out:
Prisoners in a Zindan
Russian settlers on the Persian border
Turkmen camel driver (I wish that was really his hair)
Samarkand fabric merchant
Greek Tea Harvesters
Stork in Bukhara – These are gone now, but the nests remain.
Tbilisi
A Bukharan official – they don’t dress like this anymore, unfortunately!
Shah-i-Zinda in the evening

I wish I had some of my photos scanned. The area around the Shah-i-Zinda is now a graveyard and looks extremely different. Samarkand still is breathtaking for its proximity to the mountains.

The entire archive is searchable and you can download extremely high-quality archivals of the images, both colorized ones and the b & w ones. To compare a couple, check out this B&W and this color.

For photography geeks, they also go over the colorization process.