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Serge de Prokoudine Gorsky

Born in 1863 in Murom (east of Moscow), in the family estate of Funikova Gora.

Around 1888 he attended the courses of the famous chemist Dmitri Mendeleev at the Technological Institute of Saint Petersburg. He then continued his studies of chemistry in Berlin and Paris. He collaborated with famous chemists and inventors including the German Adolf Miethe. Together, they worked on the development of methods of color photography.

His first research aimed to produce color positive films for still images (slides) and cinema. He developed a device for successively printing 3 monochrome plates through three filters. By simultaneously projecting these three red, green and blue images with judiciously filtered light sources, the original colors are reconstituted by additive synthesis (a process consisting of combining the lights of several colored sources).

In 1908, Prokudin-Gorsky went to Yasnaya Polyana, where he took a series of photographs (more than 15), the first color photographic portraits of Leo Tolstoy.

That same year, Grand Duke Michael of Russia had the opportunity to admire Prokudin-Gorsky's work and invited him to a private presentation in his palace. So much so that on May 3, 1909, a private screening was held for the imperial family. Thanks to a judicious choice of photos, he convinced Tsar Nicholas II to provide him with the necessary permits and means of transport for his project, the aim of which was to draw a portrait of the Russian Empire at the time when Russia was beginning to industrialize. He immortalized the churches and monasteries of ancient Russia, the emergence of the power of nascent industry, and the nostalgia of the populations, particularly in the Ural and Volga regions and as far as Turkestan and Afghanistan. Prokudin-Gorsky left Russia in 1918, just after the 1917 revolution, went to Norway, then to England before settling in France. He settled in Paris where he died at the Maison Russe in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.

The Library of Congress in Washington DC purchased the collection of plates from Prokudin-Gorsky's heirs in 1948. They were the subject of a major exhibition in 2001. In 2004, the Library of Congress digitized the 1,902 photographs in its possession.

He is buried with his second wife Maria Fedorovna née Schedrimo (1883-1969).