Funny how the strangest things make an impression. Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian photographer who developed some of the earliest techniques for colour photography that involved taking a series of monochrome pictures, each through a different colored filter, and projecting them using correctly-colored light to reconstruct the original color scene. Between 1909 and 1915, he travelled and documented a pre-revolution and pre-First World War Russian Empire using a specially equipped railroad car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II. Prokudin-Gorsky's original intention was to help educate Russian school-children, but we are left with a vivid and strangely evcocative collection of images, many of which look like they could have been taken yesterday.
When I was 14, I learnt Russian at school and got to travel to Moscow and Leningrad not long after Brezhnev had died – an experience which has stayed with me ever since.
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