Symbolic Forest

Following on from last Wednesday’s post, here are some more photos by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, reassembled in colour form to go on my computer desktop.

These aren’t exactly the versions I made for my desktop. There didn’t seem to be much point. I seem to have an unusually-shaped monitor,^* so wallpaper files that are useful to me probably wouldn’t be much good to any of you. Moreover, Prokudin-Gorskii’s originals aren’t a suitable shape to fit any sort of computer monitor at all.

In any case, none of these photos are in perfect shape. Most have imperfections, which come out as brightly-coloured blotches in the final version, making all the human subjects look like paint-factory workers. There tends to be a faded band at the top and bottom of each shot, which, when coloured, gives you a red fade at the bottom of the picture and a blue fade at the top. Re-cropping each picture helps avoid the worst damage on each.

I have no idea what most of these pictures are, but I still love playing with them and looking at them. I find the Prokudin-Gorskii pictures fascinating, as you can probably tell.

* Unless my calculator is being flaky or I’ve got some maths wrong, it appears to have a 5:4 aspect ratio.

Keyword noise: 1910s, desktop background, history, Imperial Russia, photography, Prokudin-Gorskii, Russia, Tsarist Russia, Library Of Congress.