Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, Peasant Girls [Russian Empire], 1909, digital colour composite by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, 2004. Three young women offer berries to visitors of their izba, a traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River, near the town of Kirillov.
Featured on PDR in the essay In Search of True Color: Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s Flawed Images
Archived amid Prokudin-Gorsky’s vast photographic survey of the Russian Empire, we find images shot through with starshatter cracks, blebbed with mildew, and blurred by motion. Within such moments of unmaking, Erica X Eisen uncovers the overlapping forces at play behind these pioneering efforts in colour photography.