It was a series of retweets which led me to an article from the Big Picture feature on Boston.com: a series of extremely early colour images by photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, extracted from a survey of the Russian Empire which was supported by no less than Tsar Nicholas II. They are incredibly sharp and saturated, probably due to the technique used.
These photographs stuck with me all day. They are disconcerting, and not just because lots of the edges don't quite line up, giving the sense that you're watching a 3-d film without your glasses, a certain sense of sea-sickness.
We as viewers of photographs have a visual language training which naturally equates the past with black and white, shades of grey, and great gritty chunks of silver on the print. This lends us a sense of security and superiority over our ancestors akin to that sense of smug righteousness which Western cultures have traditionally held towards Eastern.
'Look at them with their funny clothes! Hairstyles! Customs! Oh, aren't they quaint, and aren't we glad that we have now reached the apex of civilisation!'
Our grandparents become archived savages, affirming our own attainments and our beating pulses. Nothing more than a record of what we have moved beyond.
Prokudin-Gorskii's sitters, on the other hand, are staunchly alive. Rich with blood and breath, with their anodyne dyed clothing and even with the pores and hairs visible on their faces, these images say 'we live'.
Time passes and is recorded in the flow of a river or a restless child.
Those faint coloured phantoms of movement at the edges of the image remind we viewers of our own movement through time. Our own rejection of the past and its claim on life crumbles.
We can't live on forever on the internet, however many photos we post of ourselves on Facebook staunchly living. We'll be red, blue, and green ghosts before long.
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