Rare Color Photographs Of Imperial Russia

Capture a snapshot of the Russian Empire circa 1910 and you’d expect to see images of turmoil, chaos and an empire on the verge of bloody revolution, but these color portraits by photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii are full of a sense of serenity and peace.
Sergey used an early tri-color photo process that involved shooting the subject through three different filters-red, green and blue. These three color images were then projected through the same color filters onto a screen and superimposed, creating the realistically colored final image.
Sergey's amazing and rare color photographs come from negatives purchased by the U.S. Library of Congress in 1948, and now they're available to view online here.