7 ms·
Czarist Russia in color (1905–1915)
- stefap2 12y agoThe whole collection is here: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/?loclr=flik http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/?loclr=flik
- Lukassus 12y agoSpecifically here http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?st=grid&co=prok http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?st=grid&co=prok
- spacefight 12y agoNotice how hardly anyone is smiling at that thing named a camera obscura.
- vladnyc 12y agoI think its because they had to sit still for a long time while the photograph is taken.
- dasil003 12y agoI think it's because it's not natural to smile at a machine. Someone had to first notice that pictures would look better if people smiled, and then start telling everyone to smile until eventually the act of posing for a photograph entered the cultural consciousness.
- moioci 12y agoJudging from the blurred children, the exposure times were probably on the order of a few seconds. Even if you wanted to, it's hard to hold a smile that long.
- danabramov 12y agohttp://www.retronaut.com/2010/06/victorians-smiling-1800s/ http://www.retronaut.com/2010/06/victorians-smiling-1800s/
- ominous_prime 12y agoThese were not taken with any form of "camera obscura".
- megafounder 12y agoI show them to a friend and expected they are from the '90...
- balabaster 12y agoWhat's most awesome about these pictures, is that looking many of them, you could easily imagine they were taken today. It's astonishing that the picture of modern life we see all around us, we build up this idea in our heads that we've come so far in the past hundred or so years, but in reality, much of the world - even in the West, hasn't come that far at all.
- lmm 12y agoI wouldn't say that. The clothes look uncomfortable, there are mud tracks rather than road, the whole city is two- or even one-story buildings (which implies you'd be living without any subcultural clubs in walking distance - hope you enjoy the same things everyone else does). Even the melons the guy is selling are clearly in much worse condition than modern supermarket produce. And look at how many people it takes just to operate one small fire engine or boat. These are beautiful, fascinating pictures, but I wouldn't want to live there.
- golergka 12y agoI live in Russia, and rural towns look pretty much as you just described. Of course, there's a lot of broken asphalt on the roads, and houses don't look as good as in the photos.
- koberstein 12y agoYeah I don't know how people managed to live happy lives with all those mud tracks and sub-par melons.
- tmp1234519029 12y agoVodka.
- lmm 12y agoIf you look at happiness surveys, as best as we can tell such people would have been significantly less happy than we are.
- 12y ago
- carlob 12y agoI think it might be the same as this from 2010: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_c... Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491766
- bane 12y agoHere's a bit on the photographer and the specific technique used to capture these photos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Photography_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Photogr... When I was younger, in the early 90s, I had a chance to be on one of the earliest U.S.-Russian student exchanges following the fall of the Soviet Union. I spent a summer there, mostly in the Urals, but a bit East of those mountains as well, sometimes out in open steppe areas. If somebody asked me what my top 2 memories of that trip were I'd probably narrow down a great number of memorable moments into these two things: - The incredible warmth and hospitality of the Russian people and our host families. - The blue enormity of the Russian sky. I've never seen it captured quite right in pictures until the first time I saw Gorsky's photos. I learned later that Russian recognizes two different kinds of blue as base colors in the language: синий (what most languages call "blue") and голубой or what in English we call "light blue". Being surrounded by that sky all the time, it's no wonder. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full http://blog.properrussian.com/2011/05/what-colors-are-there-in-your-rainbow.html http://blog.properrussian.com/2011/05/what-colors-are-there-...
- tmp1234519029 12y agoFrom my stay and travels in Russia I can confirm that Russian hospitality is incredible. Plus they all have cats.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- GnarfGnarf 12y agoBeware - this site throws up 40 or 50 cookies. If you have cookie security turned on with Firefox, you have to abort Firefox in Task Manager.
- jl6 12y agoSo little litter. So little clutter in general.
- coldcode 12y agoLife from 100 years ago seems so much more real in color. We are so conditioned to color photos that B&W seems unreal. I bet the majority of the people in those pictures were never photographed again.
- bellerocky 12y agoRussia's Tzars really doomed Russia for the last hundred years + the future when they decided to wait a century or more too long to emancipate their serfs. Russians have never had a chance to experience freedom, just corruption and authoritarianism because their nobles couldn't do the right thing when almost everywhere else in Europe there was enlightenment among the higher classes. Russia also never had a French revolution or a Magna Carter. They had a failed Streltsy rebellion during Peter the Great and then 300 years later the Tsar just drops the mic, walks away resulting in the assassination of his entire family.
- viach 12y agoYou forgot about the Decembrist revolt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decembrist_revolt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decembrist_revolt
- bellerocky 12y agoYes I did, that was pretty important.
- bas 12y agoEver venture to the colorized history subreddit? http://www.reddit.com/r/colorizedhistory http://www.reddit.com/r/colorizedhistory
- Terr_ 12y agoPet peeve: I want to zoom out with my browser, but all the images are set to width:100% in a taller aspect-ratio...
- EugeneOZ 12y agoToo many not-russian nations. Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan, Georgia, Dagestan - they aren't russians. So photos with their national wears shouldn't be signed as 'Russia'.