January 17, 2007
First Gorskii Exhibit to Open in Tbilisi
On January 18, 2007, at 18:00, U.S. Ambassador John Tefft and Georgian Glass and Mineral Water Company Director Zaza Kikvadze will open the photo exhibit “Colorful Past: 100 photos of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii.” The exhibit will take place at the TBC Bank gallery space and will later travel to other parts of Georgia. This is the first time Prokudin-Gorskii’s unique color photos depicting daily life in the Russian empire circa 1900 have been displayed in Georgia. The Exhibition specifically offers a view of Prokudin-Gorskii’s work in Georgia and the South Caucasus, including photos of local dress, natural scenery, agriculture and industry.
The photos were taken from 1909 to 1915 during Prokudin-Gorskii’s travel to the Caucasus. Prokudin-Gorskii was born in 1863 in Russia. Educated as a chemist in Saint Petersburg, Berlin and Paris he devoted his career to the advancement of photography. Using a camera of his own design he created the color photos by registering on a single glass plate three separate black and white frames taken through the blue, green and red filters. A special “magic lantern” projector was used to display the pictures in color; the achieved results are impressive even by modern standards as the negatives contain an image of very high resolution.
Prokudin-Gorskii’s collection of glass plates on which the exhibition is based are part of a collection of nearly 2000 Prokudin-Gorskii images purchased by the U.S. Library of Congress in 1948. Later, the Library and American specialists developed a method to render Prokudin-Gorskii’s plates in full-color digital format, allowing reproduction and distribution of the images. In addition to the Library of Congress images, the Exhibition features four plates that are housed at the Dadiani Palace-Museum in Zugdidi.
The U.S. Embassy in Georgia received permission from the Library of Congress to print and display the images in Georgia and funded the production of color catalogue of the exhibit. Income from sales of the exhibition catalogue and posters will fund the conservation of a unique Georgian gospel manuscript dated from the 12th century. The manuscript will be displayed at the TBC Bank gallery together with the photos.
The photo exhibit “Colorful Past: 100 photos of Sergei Prokudin-Gorski” is a result of a coordinated effort of the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgian Glass and Mineral Water Company, The Dadiani Palace-Museum in Zugdidi, Foundation of the Preservation of Dadiani Palaces and the International Union of the Heirs of Dadiani Family.
This is the second photo exhibit co-sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi together with the Georgian Glass and Mineral Water Company. The first was a photo exhibit of the works of Robert Capa, a famous American photojournalist and founder of the Magnum photo agency, who photographed Georgia while traveling with American writer John Steinbeck.
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