In Newsweek, a story of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, asked by Czar Nicholas II to be the Russian royal photographer from 1907-1915. He traveled by custom dark room train, shooting on glass plates in 3 filters (R,G,B) to create the appearance of full color photographs. I love the gauzy look it gives these images.
The only glass plate negative I’ve seen was a magnificent one. My dad is Chilean, so on his 50th birthday we returned to his ranch home in the lake district, coming back to a country he hadn’t seen since he was 15. One of the places we visited was the farm home of my aunt’s boyfriend, a man she’d left behind who apparently never got over her. He and his wife had a rotting but beautiful old Victorian home in the country, with a barn full of piglets that my teenage self couldn’t get enough of. At night they let the single iron stove heater die out, so my other clear memory is of piling under dozens of blankets against the cold–an inverted princess and the pea.
Hanging around the living room one night, the farmer pulled out a box of little treasures that a missionary from England had left at his country church long ago. Tucked in with letters and idols was a perfect glass negative of the Titanic leaving port. Can you imagine?
The dark marks showed the Titanic in the first moments of it’s movement away from the dock. It wasn’t chipped or faded at all, about the size of a playing card and the thickness of a coaster, kept perfect by a man who traveled to rural Chile from England, and then passed around by the church caretakers. When we asked what he would do with it, he said it would always belong to the church, and someone would take care of it after him.
Russian photo link via @mikebarish, who has lots of good travel tweets.
