From Russia, With Life

When would you guess this photograph was taken?

What about this one?

Or this one?

To my eye, the vivid colors and sharp focus suggest that it could have been yesterday, perhaps taken with a high-end Digital SLR.

If you're anything like me, then, you'd be shocked to discover that they were each taken a century ago, the first one in 1911 and the other two in 1910. These, and many more (found here), were taken by Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (say that five times fast. Or like, once, accurately.) who used a "specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images" 

For me, looking at these pictures is nothing short of mind-blowing. Logically, I can read that the pictures were taken between 1909 and 1912. I can see the outmoded clothing styles and the antiquated architecture. But when I force myself to truly believe that these were taken one hundred years ago, I can barely comprehend the thought. For years when I was much younger I think I believed, to a certain extent, that the world existed entirely in soft-edged black and white sometime before 1950. Because I had never seen it, I genuinely could not conceive of the people I saw in movies of that era -- Abbot and Costello, The Marx Brothers, even Katherine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant -- as existing in a color-filled world. I had never seen it, therefore I could not believe it. 

As I grew older, it dawned on me that people of every era, be they flappers from the 1920's or shepherds in Ancient Greece, saw themselves and each other as vividly as I saw myself and my contemporaries. Again, I knew this intellectually, but had a difficult time actually visualizing it. Until now. These pictures, with their crisp colors and details, let me see the Russia of one hundred years ago as its inhabitants would have experienced it. 


My physics professor last year told us of a study that was conducted some years ago. Aristotle, arguably the most famous (and most boldly incorrect) scientist to come out of Ancient Greece, believed that the speed of an object's fall is proportional to its weight. That is to say, if a bowling ball and a pebble were dropped from a great height at exactly the same time, the bowling ball would hit the ground much sooner than the pebble. This seems logical enough, and most people without any scientific training probably believe this to be true. However, Aristotle had never actually performed the experiment, and it wasn't until the late sixteenth century that Galileo disproved this faulty hypothesis. Those with a background in science are taught that Aristotle was wrong and that the objects would fall at essentially the same rate. Researchers at...Some College in Some City Somewhere showed two groups of students two different movie clips. In one clip, two objects of different weights are falling with equal speed. In the other, the heavier of the two is falling faster, thus defying physics. One experimental group was made up of science majors who would almost certainly know which video showed the "correct" physics. The other was made up of those without a background in science (English majors, anyone?). The researchers then monitored their brain activity and discovered something interesting: in the brains of the science majors, when they saw the physics-defying video, a certain chemical was released into the part of the brain that detects non-sequitors and things that don't or shouldn't make sense. In the brains of the other students, the same chemical was released into that same part of the brain, except this time it happened when they saw the one with the correct physics that only seemed incorrect. 


Whew! Okay, everyone can wake up now. What I meant by that long-winded and seemingly unrelated anecdote is that I feel exactly like those English majors in the study when I look at these photographs. My brain is calling shenanigans on these pictures, telling me they can't possibly be showing me images from so long ago with such clarity and realism, even though my brain is wrong -- they are images from a century ago, and this was what things would have looked like to observers at the time. 


All of this reminds me of a segment on page 34 of the novel Atonement. Briony, a precocious thirteen-year-old, is having some philosophical thoughts, pondering existence and perception. She wonders:

Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she just as valuable to herself as Briony was?Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it...? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had. This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. For, though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers. She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn't really feel it.

I'm sure most of us have felt this way in the past, marveled at the miracle of consciousness and the fact that everyone around us is equally as real and as alive as we are. But I think it's easy to forget that this was the case for all those who came before us, not to mention all those who will come after. And these pictures have thrown this truth into sharp focus for me -- in more ways than one.

ca. 1910

ca. 1909

ca. 1910

ca. 1910