Many of these pictures were in a book called PHOTOGRAPHS FOR THE TSAR edited by Robert A. Allshouse, published by The Dial Press in 1980.

One of the things that struck me about the pictures were several of villages of extremely crude hovels (how did these people survive the winters?) huddling in the shadows of beautiful huge extremely ornate Orthodox churches. My first thought was, no wonder they had a revolution.

Here is the site of the Belorussians who deal with the photos of Proskudin-Gorskij. There are many more pictures and some other information. It's a pity that everything is in Russian.

The detail in this panorama is amazing! It feels like one could step right into that two-story building and sit down for a meal or a drink.
Denny Gill
Chugiak, Alaska

A few years ago, when the L.O.C. put up the site, I downloaded the three B&W negatives for one of the images and tried piecing it together in PaintShop Pro to make a color one. It was crude in terms of alignment, but it worked. What makes these images so cool is that they are preserved in B&W form, so the color never fades. They're just stunning! What's also cool is that they capture a way of life that vanished only a couple of years later with the revolution. What a treasure!

Operating under permission of the Czar, this guy traversed Russia taking color pictures. He did so by taking three black and white images through red, green and blue filters. They were then re-combined by projectors to produce a full color image. The modern researchers did this by computer, as one would imagine. These are much clearer (if less romantic and impressionistic) than the Autochromes used from the early 1900s until the advent of Kodachrome in the 1930s.

I guess I'm naive, but I had no idea that color photography was available so long ago!

Your viewers may be interested in the Library of Congress site that features many more of these photos as well as informaiton about the photographer and his pioneering color photography:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/gorskii.html