Exhibition of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii’s at TBC Bank Places History in Full Color
On January 18, 2007, the U.S. Embassy-sponsored exhibit “Colorful Past: 100 photos of Sergei Prokudin-Gorski” opened on the fourth floor gallery of TBC Bank, Marjanishvili Street, Tbilisi. The Exhibit is open to the public from 9am-6pm, weekdays through Friday, January 26.
This is the first time Prokudin-Gorski’s unique color photos depicting daily life in the Russian empire circa 1900 have been displayed in Georgia. The Exhibition specifically offers a view of Prokudin-Gorski’s work in Georgia and the South Caucasus, including photos of local dress, natural scenery, agriculture and industry. The Exhibit is possible due to a joint effort from the U.S. Embassy, Georgia Glass and Mineral Water Company, TBC Bank, the Dadiani Museum in Zugdidi and the board of the International Union of the Heirs of the Dadiani Family.
The photos on exhibit were taken between 1909 and 1915 during Prokudin-Gorskii’s travel to the Caucasus. Prokudin-Gorskii was born in 1863 in Russia. Educated as a chemist in Saint Petersburg, Berlin and Paris, he devoted his career to the advancement of photography. Gorskii’s color photos were created by registering a single image three times on three individual glass plates in red, green and blue. The three colored plates where then overlaid in Gorskii’s “magic lantern” projector to create a full color image. The high color resolution of this process produced wonderfully bright and clear photos of subjects usually photographed only in black and white.
The collection of glass plates on which the Gorskii exhibition is based are part of a collection of nearly 2000 Prokudin-Gorski images purchased by the U.S. Library of Congress in 1948. Later, the Library and American specialists developed a method to render Prokudin-Gorski’s plates in full-color digital format, allowing reproduction and distribution of the images. In addition to the Library of Congress images, the Exhibition features 10 plates that are housed at the Dadiani Palace-Museum in Zugdidi.
The U.S. Embassy in Georgia received permission from the Library of Congress to print and display the images in Georgia and funded the production of color catalogue of the exhibit. Income from sales of the exhibition catalogue and posters will fund the conservation of a unique Georgian gospel manuscript dated from the 12th century. The manuscript is displayed at the TBC Bank gallery together with the photos.
This is the second photo exhibit co-sponsored by the U.S. Embassy together with the Georgian Glass and Mineral Water Company. The first was a photo exhibit of the works of Robert Capa, a famous American photojournalist and founder of the Magnum photo agency, who photographed Georgia while traveling with American writer John Steinbeck.
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