June 3, 2010: Early 1900s photography collection

[Undertoad]

Welcome to Iraq, maybe 95 years ago.

One of the early IotDs that I find people discovering, over and over, is the Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii collection, which showed up on the Internets in May 2001. Those were photos from 1907-1912 or so. It turns out the earliest color process was something called Autochrome, invented in 1907.

And so somebody set out to photograph the world in it, to document the world in color, as it was.

In the early part of the 20th century French-Jewish capitalist Albert Kahn set about to collect a photographic record of the world, the images were held in an 'Archive of the Planet'. Before the 1929 stock market crash he was able to amass a collection of 180,000 metres of b/w film and more than 72,000 autochrome plates.

They've put all this into a book, out of which a few select of the photos have been offered to tempt us.

(And then this blog collected 'em all on one page, for ease of use.)

And like the earlier Prokudin-Gorskii images, having these shots in color gives us so much more information.

For example, here's the most poignant of the WW1 images.



via Neatorama