Lost and Found

You’ve never seen images like these. Really. The Museum of Russian Art’s new exhibit of photographs taken by Sergei Prokudin–Gorskii offers an unprecedented view of the Russian empire before it slipped into the fast-flowing current of history. Prokudin–Gorskii’s work is rarely exhibited, anywhere, and has never been displayed in the form intended by the artist—projected rather than framed and hung on a wall.

In a show aptly titled The Lost Empire, twenty-three of these photos are on display through the summer. It’s a small sample of the man’s work—Prokudin–Gorskii produced an unmatched photographic record of pre–Soviet Russia for an officially sanctioned archiving project, taking more than 2,000 images in eleven regions, including a number of restricted areas. The images are remarkable because Tsar Nicholas II gave Prokudin–Gorskii such a rare degree of access to the Russian empire. The resulting images, taken between 1909 and 1915, reflect the country’s surprising range of cultures, geography, and ways of life.

Only a few years after the end of Prokudin–Gorskii’s project, the Russian Revolution dramatically altered many of the scenes captured through the great photographer’s lens—a group of women harvesting tea, a Muslim woman in a bright blue burka, an Armenian woman in traditional dress against a backdrop of lush greenery. This last image represents the essence of the show and serves as its centerpiece, says the show’s curator Reed Fellner. “She embodies this idea of a lost empire,” says Fellner—a mystical, magical idea of a Russian past populated by diverse ethnic groups and rich in religious sentiment.

A chemist and trained artist, Prokudin–Gorskii composed his painterly portraits and landscapes with an “unbelievable eye for composition,” says museum director Judi Dutcher. He used a technique he developed himself involving transparencies on glass plates. The resulting color images were meant to be projected, which presented a technical challenge in showing the work. Fellner landed on the novel solution of using light boxes to create an effect similar to projection—literally illuminating a bit of history largely unknown in the West. Ongoing. Museum of Russian Art, 5500 Stevens Ave. S., Mpls., 612-821-9045