I found so much marvelous stuff on Russia last week, that it just had to spill over into another post! So, without further ado, here are two photographers who have documented Russia’s past in interesting ways.
Sergey Larenkov intermingles historical photographs of World War II’s Seige of Leningrad with contemporary photographs of the same locations. Bombed-out buildings are blended with their own rehabilitated selves; tanks roll through placid parking lots; women kneel beside the dead in urban green space. The photographs offer a tangible representation of how the past stays with us and how our own lives and times wash over it.
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, on the other hand, photographed the past while it was still the present. In the early 1900’s, Prokudin-Gorskii was sent to survey the Russian Empire by Tsar Nicolas II. He did so beautifully and, through a tri-lens process I still don’t quite understand, in color. His subjects included old Russian architecture; railroads, bridges, and other forms of transport; industry in all its forms, from factories to farms; and, perhaps most strikingly, the many peoples who inhabited the Russian Empire at the time. After his death in 1948, Prokudin-Gorskii’s heirs sold his equipment and photographs to the Library of Congress, which has created a searchable online archive of the images: The Empire That Was Russia. Worth a look, for sure.
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