Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian photographer and chemist who pioneered practical color photography and documented the Russian Empire in color.
Three-color photography: A color-imaging method that records or combines separate red, green, and blue components. Prokudin-Gorsky adapted this broader method to make color records of scenes.
Prokudin-Gorsky collection: A collection of thousands of Prokudin-Gorsky photographic negatives and related materials held by the Library of Congress. It preserves the central body of his color documentation.
James Clerk Maxwell: A Scottish physicist whose 1861 demonstration of three-color photography helped establish additive color reproduction. Maxwell's demonstration supplied an early scientific precedent for Prokudin-Gorsky's color method.
Library of Congress: The national library of the United States, which preserves and provides access to extensive historical collections. It holds most of the surviving Prokudin-Gorsky collection and made digital color composites accessible.
Autochrome Lumière: An early commercial color-photography process that used dyed starch grains on a glass plate to form a color screen. Unlike his separate records, Autochrome captured color on a single plate in one exposure.
Additive color: A color system that creates hues by combining emitted red, green, and blue light. His three monochrome records were projected through colored filters and combined as light.
Russian Empire: A state that ruled much of eastern Europe and northern Asia from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. His journeys recorded its landscapes, industries, architecture, and people.
Adolf Miethe: A German photochemist and photographer who developed color-photography equipment and taught Prokudin-Gorsky in Berlin. His instruction and technical work shaped Prokudin-Gorsky's photographic practice.
Dmitri Mendeleev: A Russian chemist best known for formulating the periodic law and arranging the chemical elements. Prokudin-Gorsky studied chemistry in an intellectual world shaped by Mendeleev's generation.
Kodachrome: A color-reversal film introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1935, using multiple layers to record color. It made color photography more practical without his sequential plate exposures.