Topic: Russia (Read 758 times)

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Here are some beautiful pictures of Russia. They were taken 100 years ago by Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii and haven't been digitally altered or anything; Prokudin-Gorskii developed a method of taking color photographs over 100 years ago. He traveled all over the Russian Empire and took pictures of people and places he thought were interesting. The Russian Empire was massive and spans many people and cultures and Prokudin-Gorskii's pictures reflect its breadth of diversity. The empire collapsed a few years after he took the pictures and many of them were confiscated or destroyed. Here are some of my favorites.





































Ivan Bilibin was a Russian artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who illustrated Russian folklore.







































Viktor Vasnetsov was another late 19th and early 20th century Russian artist that illustrated Russian folklore and history.

























I thought these pictures were pretty neat and thought I'd share them. Post whatever you want here. Art you like your stuff about Russia or whatever. I might post some more in a little bit.
Last Edit: July 01, 2010, 08:05:49 am by Jiffman
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I think you posted some of those pictures before. they really are incredible! I recognize pgorskii17 as Samarkand in Uzbekistan

edit: turns out from that very image! I guess it doesn't look like that anymore.
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I posted the photographs in whats on your mind before thanks for plagarizing me chefs

they are cool though it's almost surreal like what history was in full technicolor and shit? I dunno if the colors are oversaturated or something (the way they developed these pictures is kind of sketchy and might've caused distorted colors or something) but it kind of makes it look ridiculous like even random guy selling squash looks like pimped out [famous ][/famous] has nothing on that dude. I mean obviously when you think about it logically historical stuff was just as colorful the way they saw it but the whole fading/degrading of old pictures works on a metaphorical level also black and white ----> color feels EMERGENT in some way and it'll be weird when we have digital photos of the year 200x when it's hundreds of years from now preserved just like the day it was taken. Would like to see more  movies that are like the past but colorful and filmed normally like 'but they won't understand it's the past unless we use filters color correction' even THERE WILL BE BLOOD is like this and that movie is supposed to be serious business


pgorskii13.jpg loljews or something what are some of these ethnic groups what is the guy with the fro and the camel also camels are officially awesome

edit: to elaborate on the way they developed the photos the guy photographed a red green and blue channel basically this technology existed but there was no way to develop the film yet

Edit: Basically all video technology is being used to give movies the most obvious visual aesthetic possible yeah we'll make a cowboy movie but we will harness technology to make it the same old shit but... GRITTIER. I want to see a Western with a pastel color scheme
Last Edit: July 01, 2010, 08:05:11 am by Ragnar
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I've seen those pics from turkmenistan (is it turkmenistan?) before. They're pretty amazing. I never imagine the past being so colorful.

Also, it's like there are so few people in them. Maybe that's why I feel like there's something missing in all those scenes.
Last Edit: July 01, 2010, 06:56:28 am by Mince Wobley
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chill with the pics (2 many pics_)
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Wow, I really like Viktor Vasnetsov's work.
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I posted the photographs in whats on your mind before thanks for plagarizing me chefs
sorry........................................... i remember when hyou posted them like 2 years ago. i think bort posted them too.

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they are cool though it's almost surreal like what history was in full technicolor and shit? I dunno if the colors are oversaturated or something (the way they developed these pictures is kind of sketchy and might've caused distorted colors or something) but it kind of makes it look ridiculous like even random guy selling squash looks like pimped out [famous pimp] has nothing on that dude. I mean obviously when you think about it logically historical stuff was just as colorful the way they saw it but the whole fading/degrading of old pictures works on a metaphorical level also black and white ----> color feels EMERGENT in some way and it'll be weird when we have digital photos of the year 200x when it's hundreds of years from now preserved just like the day it was taken. Would like to see more  movies that are like the past but colorful and filmed normally like 'but they won't understand it's the past unless we use filters color correction' even THERE WILL BE BLOOD is like this and that movie is supposed to be serious business

Yeah dude, that's what I like so much about these pictures. I've seen so many pictures from the 1920s or whatever that are in sepia that I just sort of think that's how the 1920s looked. These pictures are amazing to me because they not only show people living the same way they did 1000 years ago, but because they show how colorful and bright and NOT SEPIA 1000 years ago really was. I think my favorite picture is the observatory in the snow. That rug hanging on the yurt or whatever in the background blows my mind. It looks like the standby TV signal. What is that thing? Why is it there? Why is it so colorful?? I guess it's just so amazing to me because of all those black and white photographs I've seen that made me think the world was black and white, and here's this ultra-colorful towel thing that's just sort of an afterthought in the picture.


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pgorskii13.jpg loljews or something what are some of these ethnic groups what is the guy with the fro and the camel also camels are officially awesome

Yeah, those guys are Bukharan Jews living in Samarkand in Uzbekistan. Bukharan Jews basically don't exist anymore, or at least not in Central Asia. They've all immigrated to Israel and the US, which is kind of a shame because they had a pretty unique culture that was really distinct from the surrounding Central Asian cultures and other Jewish cultures.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2957395/Russia/pgorskii1.jpg

This dude is Alim Khan, who was the last ruler of the Emirate of Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which was a vassal state to the Russian Empire at the time. Apparently he was the last direct descendant of Genghis Khan to act as a ruler.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2957395/Russia/pgorskii2.jpg

The camel dude is a Turkmen. People kind of assume that all Uzbeks are from Uzbekistan and all Kazakhs are from Kazakhstan and all Turkmen are from Turkmenistan and so on, but that's not really true. The peoples of Central Asia were mostly nomadic and borders were pretty nebulous back then. In fact, the 'stan' countries didn't really exist as we know them today and are kind of products of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2957395/Russia/pgorskii6.jpg
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2957395/Russia/pgorskii7.jpg

These guys are merchants from Samarkand in Uzbekistan. Most of the people from the stan countries are Turkic. There's this misconception that Turks come from Turkey, but actually the Turks migrated there from Central Asia and Siberia in the middle ages. In fact, Turks have probably been in Europe for thousands of years. The Huns that invaded Europe in the fourth century were possibly remnants of a Turkic confederation called the Xiongnu that traveled west. The people of Hungary call their own language "Magyar" after the Turkic peoples that migrated there in the middle ages. So yeah, Turks are from Central Asia and Siberia.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2957395/Russia/pgorskii9.jpg

These people are Kyrgyz, which is another Turkic group.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2957395/Russia/pgorskii10.jpg

This guy is Bashkir. Most Bashkirs live in Bashkortostan, which is one of the federal republics of Russia. Most ethnic minorities in Russia have it pretty rough, but Bashkortostan is one of the wealthiest Russian republics because of its massive reserves of natural resources so most Bashkirs are at least economically better off than other minorities. Not that that's really uh, much better.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2957395/Russia/pgorskii11.jpg

This is a nomadic Uzbek woman.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2957395/Russia/pgorskii12.jpg

This guy is from Dagestan, which is a federal republic in the Caucasus Mountains. You can tell how influential Georgian culture is in Dagestan by looking at this guy's clothing. The Caucasus are really interesting because so many different people live there. I have no idea what culture this dude specifically is, but most of the people in Dagestan are Iranian, Turkic, or Caucasian (like Georgian Caucasian, not white caucasian).

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2957395/Russia/pgorskii18.jpg

These are poppies. Somebody smoked this shit.

Central Asia and Russia are really cool.
Last Edit: July 07, 2010, 03:52:14 am by Jiffman
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I posted the photographs in whats on your mind before thanks for plagarizing me chefs

they are cool though it's almost surreal like what history was in full technicolor and shit? I dunno if the colors are oversaturated or something (the way they developed these pictures is kind of sketchy and might've caused distorted colors or something)
actually im pretty sure he took different pictures with different color filters and then developed them together into a color print, that would explain why the camel and the water look strange. thats movement guys
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I remember seeing these photos some time ago.  Crazy impressive, especially when you realize that they were taken over 100 years ago.  They somehow make the past seem more real.
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Central Asia and Russia are really cool.

I don't know enough about them to say they are really cool (i mean they will be, loads of places are cool) but it's only in the last year or so I've become aware that alot of these countries even exist, and how much of a weird kind of space they occupy now between what my previous conception of the world was. You've got the west.....and then...you've got the east. Where do you draw that line, what's near the middle, and what is in all that space on the maps and stuff - these are things I never thought about. I mean obviously there is no line, that's what I am finding out, it's all a gradient and not necessarily a coherent one.

I still know barely anything about these areas of the world, though.
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I was going to make a stupid in soviet russia x ys you post but these photos are really amazing. I'm having trouble thinking about them as 100 years ago while I'm looking at them. Kind of like those pieces of colour footage of the second world war which just look like a really good reenactment rather than the real deal because colour.
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Wow. Every once in a while you find something on the internet that really astounds you, beyond the usual meme/stupid videos thang. Thanks a lot for posting these, they're amazing!
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Yeah it's really disorienting to see those photographs in colour! I wonder if it's some byproduct of being constantly exposed to television and photography and computers and things, where you end up taking a level of realism and directness for granted so that anything from the past that wasn't captured in hi-def colour or whatever takes on a slightly unreal, phantasmagoric quality (heh good luck with your 'paintings' cavemen *surfs down the internet*). It really throws me just to see even the landscape shots of old windmills and things in colour, since I guess I'm used to thinking about everything outside the last 60 years or so with a kind of patronising detachment and suddenly it hits home that woah people lived here, people saw this, this was all real.

Those Ivan Bilibin paintings are amazing too. They remind me a lot of Herge or someone (I know nothing about visual arts so comic book comparisions are the best youre gonna get sorry HMM BOLD BLACK OUTLINES CLEARLY A PRECURSOR TO SAILOR MOON). Like just the way he draws tree bark even.
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I remember some of those paintings from my high school russian history class. russian history is like some grotesque bloody fairy tale

I just got an historical atlas up to 500 bc the other day. it's kinda nonacademic but it has a lot of really great maps about the origins of humans and cultures and migration routes. I don't know if it mentions turks yet

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i was born in russia, and my mother is from azerbaijan

i emulated gorskii's method to make colour photos once, it's cool
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man those paintings are really really cool!
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Yeah it's really disorienting to see those photographs in colour! I wonder if it's some byproduct of being constantly exposed to television and photography and computers and things, where you end up taking a level of realism and directness for granted so that anything from the past that wasn't captured in hi-def colour or whatever takes on a slightly unreal, phantasmagoric quality (heh good luck with your 'paintings' cavemen *surfs down the internet*). It really throws me just to see even the landscape shots of old windmills and things in colour, since I guess I'm used to thinking about everything outside the last 60 years or so with a kind of patronising detachment and suddenly it hits home that woah people lived here, people saw this, this was all real.

I swear this is the last time I'll mention ghana movie posters but beyond the obviously strange stuff (spy who love me) I love how the subject matter is all shit movies from the 80's and 90's or even stuff that just came out like VAN HELSING etc. (which is also shit) but the art style is fuck knows what some of them are like renaissance art or something (not saying it successfully imitates the style) plus the wear and tear of the posters (which are literally done on a sack of potatoes or something) it makes like just a couple years ago seem incredibly distant and it's a really weird effect (or possibly time travel effect someone randomly dumps a DVD of Transporter 2 in medieval times when some experiment goes awry) but yeah I'm dumb american ignorant of all this stuff is it like when everybody from UK seemed to know more about American musical history blues music than we did Rolling Stones etc. do people in Ghana randomly learn about Albrecht Durer or someone like that to the point it seriously shapes their art style help

the russian paintings remind me of that one episode of Animatrix

Edit: I hope somebody starts a traveling arcade business in Ghana because I want to see like random Playstation 2 box art done in that way. Like some Dragon Ball Z the Final Fantasy games would probably look amazing

Edit: I think I posted a couple of early electronic music things there was that Indian guy who was making acid house 10 years ahead of time not that that's severely anachronistic but it's funny because it sounds so authentic. Raymond Scott is awesome too

also where are those full-color HD world war ii photos

Edit: whoa this is almost Ghana videogame box art

http://media.heavy.com/media/2010/04/crackdown.jpg
Last Edit: July 03, 2010, 03:53:50 am by Ragnar
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found some more photos like this, a little strangeness with the color but still has that new feel in a lot of shots

http://citynoise.org/article/10598

watch out for lolpenis near the beginning

Edit: people had penises back then
Last Edit: July 04, 2010, 08:40:34 pm by Ragnar
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This is so surreal.... it's like A WINDOW TO THE PAST. Cool stuff.