Colored Russia in photographs of the late 19th - early 20th centuries: St. Petersburg and the Russian North

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-10 19:47

In the Internet archives, we found 140 magnificent photochromic postcards of the Russian Empire in the late 19th - early 20th century.

This is one of the first color postcards made using the photochromic method. They capture the beauty and sights of the cities and regions of the Russian Empire in the late 19th - early 20th centuries - St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Odessa, Kiev, Helsingfors (Helsinki), Warsaw, the Caucasus, Crimea, the Kola Peninsula and other cities.

Photochromes were in great demand among the mass buyer and quickly became an amateur collectible. These were postcards, and spectacular large-format panoramas, and medium-sized prints on thin paper, pasted into albums or framed and decorated the walls of bourgeois living rooms.

The photochrome method is a method of coloring menochromic photographs (especially for printing), developed in the 1880s by Hans Jakob Schmid, thanks to which, at the end of the 19th century, it became possible to start mass production of color images.

The technology required painstaking work. The light-sensitive emulsion was applied to lithographic stones and exposed to sunlight through the negative. For several hours, it froze in proportion to the tones of the negative, and a fixed image remained on the stone. A separate printing plate was made for each shade. Therefore, in the production of one postcard, up to ten or more printing stones could be involved.

Here is how the benefits of photochrome are described in a catalog by the Detroit Photographic Company, which acquired a patent for the technology in the 1890s: “This is the only known way to create natural-color photographs without manual coloring.