“RGB Keyboards before they were cool (they were never cool)”
I have been fascinated by color for a while. I’ve had a novel idea swirling around in my head for upwards of a decade that’s entirely about the human limits of color perception. I like colors not because I would say I’m particularly good at mixing or matching colors or anything like that, though. If you’ve seen my paintings that I made for my freshman year extracurricular painting class in college, they are not good. My professor said, quote, “You have an eccentric style.” Read: “You are bad but I can’t say that because this is a 100-level art class for high-stress honors kids.” He complimented the composition of my paintings because they were “eccentric,” but I regularly lost points on color mixing assignments. AKA the foundational work of the class. Point is that I suck at colors. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate them.
I also have been fascinated with photography for ages. Not, like, fascinated enough to understand the in-depth science or composition or artistic fundamentals of the process. I know a good photograph when I see one, and I know that I am not good at taking photographs. Actually, funny parallel, I took a photography class my junior year in college, and also passed (barely) because my professor appreciated the alternative style I brought to the subjects. Read: “You lack a grasp of photographic fundamentals but your content is passable because this is an environmental communications class, not a photography class.” (As a matter of fact, I actually already uploaded all those pictures that I took; you can see them here and here) Pictures are also a big part of my life; I take pictures of everything as a form of documentation (hence the “photobomb” posts that show up sometimes). If I’ve met you more than once, I have a picture of you, and you probably didn’t even know I took it. Which is kind of weird to say out loud, but it’s true. Don’t worry, it’s lost with the hundred thousand other photos I have on my computer. That’s not an exaggeration.
Hopefully you understand now that I have zero visual artistic ability in anything other than what you might call “Folk art.” But I bring this all up to demonstrate that, even if I have zero ability or capacity to offer critique on artistic merit, I at least can appreciate things like the use of color or photography or things that aren’t terrible. Which is why when certain things strike me as particularly jarring or startling, for one reason or another, it gets stuck in my head. And I don’t mean just things that I appreciate for their beauty, either. Beauty is one thing, sure. It’s easy to point out things that are beautiful. Mountains are beautiful. The Mona Lisa is beautiful. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is beautiful. It’s easy to appreciate beauty. It’s hard to appreciate things that make you uncomfortable.
I appreciate the works of someone like Hieronymus Bosch because of how utterly batshit fucking crazy they are, and I think they’re funny. I appreciate horror movies, not because they are beautiful (at least, not usually), but because I love the grotesque, creative designs the movies use and because they are some of the few things that make me feel anymore. I appreciate chunky, crusty old-school video games, not because they are visually or aurally appealing (most of the time), but because of what they represent in history and what they let you do. I appreciate paintings like Picasso’s Guernica, or Frida Kahlo’s My Birth (graphic content warning for that one), or the modern works of Kehinde Wiley not because they are beautiful (though at least in Wiley’s case they are undoubtedly beautiful), but because they are upsetting and uncomfortable in ways that force me to think about the meaning behind the paintings, of what I think they mean and what the artist intends them to mean.
I appreciate things for their ability to captivate my attention and make me interact with them. For something’s ability to startle, provoke, engage, or otherwise discomfort me, be it through beauty, depth of content, or other means. But what does it mean when these jarring things happen to be just plain-old color photography? When the thing that’s most, for lack of a better word, upsetting about them isn’t the content of the works themselves, but the context that surrounds it? When something falls into the uncanny valley and yet has no place there. What do you do with that? It has no place in the realm of the weird, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong with it. What then? Friends, I wish now to draw your attention to the unaccountably and unexplainably eerie photography of Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky, a Russian photographer who documented the Russian Empire for Tsar Nicholas II, between 1905 and 1916.
Prokudin-Gorsky (I think I’ll just call him Sergey for the rest of the article. Is that alright with everyone?) was born in western Russia in 1863, died in Paris, France in 1944, and is considered one of the fathers of color photography and created one of the earliest (and perhaps only?) substantial visual documentations of the Russian empire. There is nothing unsettling or eerie about the content of the photos themselves. Nothing about them is outwardly frightening or upsetting. Most of them are just people living their lives, or buildings, or landscapes. I mean, you could make the argument that anything coming out of Nicholas II’s Russia was uncanny because of the rampant human rights abuses inherent to empire, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. Anyway, the fact that it’s Russian isn’t even the uncanny part, especially with current (as of this writing) political climates. What I want to draw your attention to is the time when these pictures were taken.
You read it right the first time: 1905 to 1915. Sergey (that doesn’t feel right), er, Prokudin-Gorsky took full-color photographs over a hundred years ago. In Nineteen Fucking Ten, this guy was running around taking pictures in color. It just totally blows my mind. And it’s the way these pictures make me feel that is the truly eerie part.
Let’s back up a minute, and talk about the photography process itself. So, I don’t understand a ton of the science behind photography, but I did enough research to be dangerous/to write this post, so I’ve got a most basic understanding. And that understand has led me to this conclusion; you can effectively divide photography in film and digital methods. The names are pretty literal; film photography uses a thin sheet of material, usually paper or glass, that has been coated with a photoreactive substance. In Prokudin-Gorsky’s day, that substance was probably silver gelatin. When you expose these films to light, i.e. by opening the shutter on a camera, the film captures an image of the light as it is reflected off whatever the camera is pointed out. You can then take that film, which is called a negative at that point, and develop it in a dark room, where, by using a ton of wild chemicals that probably could also get you high as a kite and/or kill you, you end up with your final photograph. For everyone over the age of, say, forty who’s reading this, you probably already knew all that. But for my #zoomers out there, that’s how cameras used to work before you could stick them in your pocket and also play Among Us and Fortnite on them. Oof, despite working with them, I’m really out of touch with kids and people my own age.
Here’s the catch though; the cheapest and easiest sort of film only records in black and white. If you want color, there are about a billion different extra steps you have to take on top of the already very taxing work of recording and developing photographs. Color film has been around since the 1880’s at least, but it was hard, messy, super easy to fuck up, and most of, expensive. Easy, single-film color photography wasn’t readily available until, like, the 1930’s (roughly 1935 with the Kodachrome film set), and according to my Wikipedia browsing, color photography wasn’t commonly used by the average person until the 1970’s (probably thanks to 1963’s Polaroid and its instant color photography). I’ve got family members who probably remember that transition from black and white to color (looking at you, Ralph and Jane). But think of how mind-blowing color photography was to people in the 20th century; when Wizard of Oz came out in 1939, people lost their dogdamned minds. And it wasn’t even the first color film! Color film had been around since 1908 at least!
Back in the day, getting color photography meant using several pieces of film with different color sensitivities, or in the case of Prokudin-Gorsky, taking three pictures through different colored lenses (three, to be exact; one red, one green, one blue) to have three different black and white images, and then projecting all three black-and-white images through those same colored lenses in order to get the actual color picture. That’s, like, the most basic possible explanation of how he did it. Take three pictures in different colors and overlap them. Sounds easy? It’s not. Needless to say, it was incredibly difficult, and, at the time, maybe impossible? to actually replicate or show these pictures anywhere without tons of special equipment. It wasn’t like you could print them out or something. Prokudin-Gorsky wasn’t the first to use color photography equipment, or even the person entirely responsible for this tricolor photography method, but hot damn was he dedicated to it. Nicholas II paid him to take more than ten thousand of these color photographs, many of which are now lost. That means, in reality, he took probably close to thirty thousand pictures. Across a decade or more. Prior to World War One.
The pictures on my webpage of Prokudin-Gorsky’s photos aren’t even really prints of the photos themselves; just as it was difficult to get them back then, it took work to get them now. Not for me, of course, I just right-clicked and hit “copy.” Lots of work for someone else, though. Color photos of Prokudin-Gosrky’s work didn’t really readily exist until the dogdamn year 2000, when the fucking Library of Congress digitized them. They had to take all the old negatives they had, and the black-and-white surviving images, and digitally edit them to be in their appropriate color and then overlay them to create a composite color image. And then you’re left with these incredibly eerie, yet totally stunning, colored pictures from a time and an empire that no longer exists.
And that brings us to digital photography. Digital photography, which has been around since the 70’s (that’s weird), but wasn’t really economically available until the 1990’s, works in a similar way to analogue film. Instead of using a sheet of paper doused in photoreactive drugs chemicals, a light-sensitive membrane covered in millions of tiny light cavities collects light and turns it into electrical signals (i.e. computer code, binary, 1’s and 0’s) that gets stored digitally and can be reproduced on a screen. How do those light cavities record and perceive light? I don’t fucking know. Photons or something, probably. But I do know that, in order to perceive color instead of just brightness (and therefore instead of just black and white), digital cameras read light in three different colors (or, for those physicists out there, three different wavelengths of light). Each sensor reads light in red, green, or blue, (also know as RGB), and then tells the computer how strong the presence of that color is at any given point on the camera’s sensor. This lets you digitally take as many pictures of your feet as you want to sell on the internet.
Wait, but why red, green, and blue? Why not, like, red, blue, and yellow, like I was taught in first grade? Well, just like most things we learn in the American education system, turns out that red, blue, and yellow being primary colors is pretty fucking wrong. Like, two-thirds wrong. Failing grade wrong. Disappoint your parents wrong. In reality, the true “material” primary colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow. Anyone who says “red, blue, and yellow” is wrong, and you can tell them they are wrong, and then add “actually, it’s Frankenstein’s monster, you dolt” at the end. Hold up, I hear you saying. “Material” primary colors? What the fuck does that mean?
Listen, I got into an uncomfortable deep hole of color theory, so now you have to hear about it, too. When you paint with something, you’re creating color by subtraction. Paints, pigments, they all work by reflecting or absorbing light off of a surface. So if you paint with cyan, and mix it with magenta, you get blue, because you’re creating pigments that absorb, or remove, every wavelength of light except blue. This is material, or subtractive, color. You cannot create pure cyan, magenta, or yellow out of any mixture of anything other than cyan. Additive color, on the other hand, or what we think of as digital color, has to do with how things emit light. Think your computer screen; instead of reflecting light, it is actively emitting light. By changing what wavelength of light is emitted, and to what brightness, you can mix and match to get pretty much any color. Pretty much every digital device you use has emitters that, per pixel, emit different strengths of red, green, or blue light to create the image you’re seeing right now (technically with LCD screens it’s white light that is filtered by colored pixels, not colors that are emitted, but you get the idea). If you get close enough to your screen, you might even be able to see the individual pixels. You’ll also burn your eyes, and it will hurt. I tried it just now, trust me.
Why red, green, and blue, though? Well, supposedly it has to do with the fact that the human eye sees three wavelengths of color; red, green, and blue. This comes from a 19th century theory of trichromatic vision, which is in turn based on the (maybe apocryphal?) story that Isaac Newton used prisms of red, green, and blue light to create pure white light, just like the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. The theory was that, since red, green, and blue are basically the “fundamental components” of white light, then that must be what humans can see the best. Once again, that’s not really true. In reality, our eyes are best adapted to see violet, green, and yellow light, but no one knew this for a while. Also, this is your regularly scheduled reminder that the peacock mantis shrimp exists, and they have twelve color receptors plus polarized light and UV, and can see probably millions of colors we don’t even know exist. But humans only have three receptors, and they aren’t even truly red, green, and blue. But Microsoft and global printer conglomerate/blood cartel HP decided in the 90’s that RGB was the way to go, and that’s been the standard for digital color ever since. That’s not a joke. That’s literally what happened.
The upside of using RGB is that, since the colors are pretty far apart on the color spectrum, you can make pretty much every color in between, and some outside of it, too. However, as a result of this, there are actually colors that exist in the real world that your computer screen physically cannot replicate. Those people that refuse to take scenery pictures on vacation because “the camera never really captures it” might be on to something; your camera (or at least your screen) literally cannot replicate all the colors in the real world. That being said, high-quality RGB displays can produce 16 million different hues of color; the average human eye can only discern 10 million of them. Don’t ask me how scientists figured that out. I don’t know. Also, here’s a link to a picture with all 16 million hues built in. Can you name them all? My favorite is bimbleberry blue.
Could you use other primary colors for your digital display? Absolutely. You might not get more colors out of it, but you can try. I mean, if you have a computer that could do Red, Orange, and Yellow (the fabled ROY of Roy G. Biv), you’d have a very warm LCD screen. The key is distance of color, for the most part. Which is also presumably why Prokudin-Gorsky (remember him? From, like, five paragraphs ago?) chose red, green, and blue for his primary colors, too. And I think, frankly, the results speak for themselves.
Ok, I think that’s enough color theory for now. That was, like, 90% of my research for this, but I think we all have a good enough idea now of how it all works. And this is all just a really roundabout way of saying that color photography is really fucking difficult, and we live in a world of wonders that you can stare at your screen and pick any one of sixteen million colors and it will appear in an instant, and you don’t even have to thank the color goblins that live in your computer’s video card to do it. But, honestly, I think it’s that gap that makes these old photographs so utterly bizarre to me. I grew up in a world of color; I have never once existed in a time or place where I could not take a color image at will. I have literally had one of history’s most advanced cameras in my pocket every waking moment of my life since I was twelve, and I never thought twice about it. Every part of my world has had the ability to be documented in full color, in high resolution, at any time. For basically free.
But the past is different, obviously. I also grew up in a world where we watched documentaries about world war one or world war two in black and white. Where “color” isn’t a thing that exists in the past. Everything was black and white in the past. I have to literally remind myself that the past was not literally black and white. I mean, think about some of the staples of 20th century American culture. Movies like Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Psycho. TV shows like The Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke. Newsreels from D-Day, Hitler’s speeches, the Pacific theater. All those famous Great Depression photos. America’s history is in black and white. Don’t get me wrong, there is contemporary color photography for those eras. There are reels of footage of World War II that were shot in color. There are photographs of World War I in color! Hell, there’s a picture of Mark Twain in color. But it was so expensive to shoot in color, and even more expensive to show it in color. We talk about there being a cultural shift around the Vietnam war, with it being the first “televised” war. That was in black and white a lot of the time too! How about a cultural shift around color?
That lack of color marks a distinct gap in history and time to me. History isn’t real; it’s all in black and white, see? These aren’t real things that happened, they’re just films and photos shot on a screen. Maybe this giving away my (young) age, and the fact that I am a product of my times, but people talk about having WWII footage in black and white makes it more “real.” No. Absolutely not. It does not look more real to me that way. It makes it distant, far away, a thing that happened to other people in another time. There’s that saying that the past is another country; for me, and I suspect this is true of lots of people my age (and probably older, too), the past never happened at all.
I don’t mean this literally. Obviously, the past happened. I’m not subscribing to the “Last Thursday” theory or anything, where all our memories are fake and everything came into existed just as it was last Thursday. And logically I know this is true. I can tell myself, this is the continuum of history. This is the way things happened, and why. These were real people, and they thought and acted in ways that I might have thought and acted if I lived back then. But I don’t feel that way. I can’t emotionally feel the past. It doesn’t feel real. Even as a historical interpreter, as someone whose literal job it is to teach about the past, it doesn’t feel real. I can understand the history of a plot of land for the last ten thousand years, and how that entire history shapes the fact that it is now a small park with oak restoration and a shitty snowmobile trail, but it still doesn’t feel real. The past is what happened to me last year, a decade ago, twenty years ago. The past is what my parents talk about, when they were kids. Besides that? Might as well never have happened.
Which is why it is so fucking weird to have these full-color images come screaming into my face, exploding out of nowhere with the implicit knowledge that these are real people, and they really existed, and you will never really know them or their life.
Think about the first time you saw a picture of your parents from their high school years. Was that weird? All their goofy 80’s hair, and leg warmers, and perms? That sharp realization that your parents had a life before even considering your existence? In a world that looks so different than the one you’re in now? I think this is the same experience, but on a global scale. This all first caught my eye because I was researching the history of yurts for my job, because working for parks is fucking weird, and I came across this photo on the yurt Wikipedia page:
Look at it. Nice, right? A little blurry. That’s a cool cultural touchstone, something I could use when talking about yurts. What year was this picture taken? It’s pretty nice, I could maybe use it in a presentation. Hmm, let me see…. NINETEEN THIRTEEN??? FUCKING WHAT? That can’t possibly be right. Is it? This picture looks like it came out of a Nat Geo article last month. When this picture was taken, World War One hadn’t even happened yet. Franz Ferdinand hadn’t yet been assassinated. Woodrow Wilson was president. Queen Elizabeth wasn’t even born yet, let alone an immortal werewolf-vampire hybrid. And yet this girl looks like she could step out of the picture right now and talk to me. I could go find her, and this exact yurt, and take a similar picture. But I can’t. Because she is dead and everyone she knew is dead.
It’s the little details that do it for me. The green in the trees behind the yurt. The rug she’s standing on. Her boots, poking out from beneath her dress. This is a real person, living their real life, in a manner and culture that is so completely and utterly foreign to me. I, naively, imagine most people of the world today living a life similar to me, living in a relatively urban area and buy food from the grocery story while working at a job that has little to do with day-to-day survival except to earn money. And, thanks to globalization and industrialization, for better or for worse, this is largely true for maybe two-thirds (or more?) of the Earth’s population, with some major or minor differences in things like culture, language, and climate here and there. And, although this is definitely wrong, it’s hard to imagine the past being any different. And again, maybe this is giving away my age/naivety/general insular suburban bubble I grew up in, but these pictures absolutely shatter those expectations. These pictures make it perfectly clear that the life I live is an aberration; the world I am in now is not the world of my grandparents. My great-grandparents. My ancestors a hundred, five hundred, a thousand years ago. The changes the planet has undergone in just a century are utterly mind-boggling, and these pictures, for me, highlight just how extreme these changes have been. And, what’s more, they make that past feel wholly real.
As a historical interpreter, I dress up in 1890’s clothes for my job. I walk through 1800’s buildings, in full color, stocked with period-appropriate items, also in full color. I work at a place that does some of the most grounded work in making the past seem real, and bringing it to life. And yet, there’s still a gap there. Maybe it’s because we don’t do first person interpretation, and we teach about the past from an educational standpoint. Maybe it’s because I see behind the veil and see how the sausage is made and all the weird little anachronisms that exist in our history park. I know where the security cameras are. I know how recently the buildings were renovated. I know where the box of dead horse bones are. I try my best to make history feel real for our guests, but I can’t make it feel real for me. I love my job, and I love teaching history, and I think I’m decent at it, but I can’t shake the notion that I am teaching on a thin veneer of historic gold foil and just underneath is weird bureaucracy and flattened raccoons, and if you poke a hole in it, the illusion falls apart. I know people did really life in these houses. They are genuine historic buildings. But they don’t feel real.
There is a lot of value in teaching history the way that we do. It’s so much easier to address sensitive topics, like race and genocide, by operating just at the edge of history. You can give a much more holistic picture to guests. Getting across deeper ideas of historic continuum and change, which I think are the most important things we can teach, is much more effectively done in a way that isn’t pretending that I am Bingus C. Dingus, Immigrant Banker and 1890’s Human. And yet nothing that I am ever going to be able to do will come anywhere close to achieving the sheer visceral reaction I have to these photographs.
As a person who dresses up in the same clothes that some of the people in these photographs are wearing, it’s easy for me to fall into the mental trap that they, too, are acting. That, even if they are wearing these clothes, they go home at the end of the day and change into comfy pajamas and fluffy socks. They, too, are interpreters, posing for my benefit. But they aren’t. They’re not, and they never were, acting. They don’t go home and change clothes at the end of the day. These are their clothes. This is their life. They don’t go home and change after their picture was taken. They continue going about their lives as they lived them a hundred years ago. These are real photographs, and even though 1940’s wartime footage is just as real as these pictures from the 1910’s, that gap in color makes such an immense difference.
I don’t think I will ever quite articulate just how weird these photos make me feel, not in a way that totally captures what I’m trying to say. I mean, look at that photo up there. I work with tools just like that on an actual field for work as demonstration and it doesn’t always (sometimes it does, admittedly) feel real. It feels like you could step into that picture and shake hands with them. Like you could transport yourself back in time and really be there. Or like you could go out and find these people doing that same thing today. It doesn’t feel like a huge leap of imagination to picture yourself there, the same way it isn’t a huge leap in memory to remember yourself a particularly fun point in your life when looking back at old photographs of your own past. Like when you flip through your snapchat memories and come across all those videos of you puking in your sister’s boyfriend’s best friend’s cousin’s bathroom on New Year’s 2019, while “Cotton-Eyed Joe” plays on repeat in the background. Good times. Easy to remember.
Historic continuity would that say that, yeah, a hundred years ago isn’t that long, and some people do still live in ways similar to this today. Similar to people in all these pictures. And that what I’m describing perhaps borders on fetishism, or exoticization of other cultures, and that I lack a wide enough worldview to fully understand and appreciate how other people truly live, even in my own time. You could argue that’s a gap in empathy on my part, and you could also argue that the ruling class benefits from reducing its population’s ability to empathize with others so we are never taught to imagine lives other than our own, and that I am a product of my dystopian American world. But that feels cheap, somehow. It feels like I’m missing the forest for the trees. And that, in some ways, viewing these pictures is like coming up against something utterly unknowable. Something, as the transcendentalists might put it, sublime. And I think there’s value in appreciating that, and appreciating the role color plays in it.
And perhaps that is what makes these pictures so uncomfortably eerie to me. They are physical (well, digital) reminders that not only is there a world out there I do not understand, there is thousands of years of a world out there I don’t understand, and possibly never will. There are things I will never know, things I will never understand, and worlds I will never visit even on our own planet. These pictures, by a Russian man who lived and died in a world totally foreign to my own, have triggered something so utterly uncomfortable inside of me for no reason other than they make history real. And it is because they are in color, and I am so used to thinking of the past in black and white. That’s it. That’s all it took.
And of course, this experience may be very, very different for anyone else reading this. Are you old? You may feel differently about history than I do! Can’t see in color? Well, none of this stuff about color theory really matters then, huh? But even that is part of the beauty and uncanny nature of it; each of us, every person alive, lives a world entirely separate from each other. We share, and think, and communicate, but we’ll never really know someone else’s life, at least the same way we know our own. These pictures are reminders of that. Of that gap of experience and perception that each of us carries, every day. We are alone, each man an island. The past is gone, it is dead. And nothing can bring it back. But they’re also reminders, in an ironic way, that we are alone together. Each and every one of us is in the exact same boat, a fleet of ships of perception and experience on the seas of time. Every person who has ever lived, hundreds of thousands of years, has gone through this, and look at all we’ve accomplished. The past is dead, but it’s also very much alive; it happened, it has built our world to be what it is now, and how we think about what happened actively changes its legacy. That’s one of the beauties of historical interpretation, too. We have as much power to interact with the past as we choose. And even if that interaction is as little as looking at these photos and thinking, huh, life was pretty different back then, that’s something. It’s more than you had yesterday.
Prokudin-Gorsky’s photos are eerie, and unsettling. But in a real, tangible way, they are also some of the most beautiful photographs I have ever seen. And I can do nothing but love them.
The past isn’t black and white. It’s in full, living, vivid color.
