Unlocking the Color: Photographs by Sergei M. Prokudin-Gorskii, 1909 to 1915

The following interview with photographer Walt Frankhauser is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief of the Prints & Photographs Division. Back in 1948, the Library of Congress acquired close to 2,000 rare glass-plate negatives created by the Russian photographer Sergei M. Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944). We knew that what appeared to be black-and-white images could be “rendered” in color, because Prokudin-Gorskii captured each scene through blue, green, and red filters. But the available techniques for recovering the color were so costly that, after fifty years, special projects for books and exhibits had produced only a small number of color images available for viewing. The arrival of digitizing technology inspired the Library’s scan center director, Lynn Brooks, to try again and to…