22 March 2012 Last updated at 01:24

In pictures: Russian Empire in colour photos

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii - self-portrait on the Korolistskali river, Georgia (probably 1912)

This vivid colour photograph is 100 years old, a self-portrait by the Russian aristocrat Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, using a unique photographic technique he developed himself. Prokudin-Gorskii studied chemistry under Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table, before travelling to Berlin to study photochemistry.

Russian farmers on the Black Sea - 100 years ago.

Prokudin-Gorskii took thousands of pictures between 1909-1912 as he toured the Russian empire, armed with a special pass from Tsar Nicholas II. He created a panorama of all the peoples, landscapes, industries and antiquities under Russian possession.

Prokudin-Gorskii (left) toured all across the Russian empire from the far north to the Afghan border to create a photographic survey for Tsar Nicholas II.

His travels took him from the far north to the Afghan border. In this picture Prokudin-Gorskii is the figure in the beige coat, enjoying a ride on a rustic hay-filled cart.

His pictures catch Russia about to enter the modern world. Railway tracks were starting to creep into territories the Russians barely knew. Prokudin-Gorskii’s darkroom was a railway carriage provided by the tsar.

He took his pictures on large glass plates. Each image was caught three times - with red, blue and green filters. Projected together, the triple image appeared in full colour. It was only after the advent of digital photography, however, that it became possible to create high quality colour prints of Prokudin-Gorskii's work.

The photographs open an unexpectedly vivid window on a long-vanished world. Here is the crew of the steamship Sheksna, on the Volga-Baltic waterway. The figure standing second-from-right moved his head during one of the three separate colour exposures, each of which lasted from one to three seconds.

These families are harvesting tea on the plantations in Georgia. They are ethnic Greeks - a strong community at that time, but almost vanished now.

Prokudin-Gorskii took the train to the far south and the city of Samarkand, which had been captured by the Russian army not long before. It is now in modern Uzbekistan.

Here are the dignitaries, scholars and schoolboys of the city in their best clothes, alongside the poor.

Before long, the subjects of Prokudin-Gorskii's photographs would be plunged into war. Some would flee during World War I and the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution. Others became Soviet citizens.

These two men are selling tickets for the circus. You can see Cyrillic writing, newly-introduced to Russia's Central Asian territories, on the poster advertising strong men and daredevil horse-riding acts.

Prokudin-Gorskii himself left in 1918, spending time in Norway and Britain, before settling in France. His family kept his glass plates safely in a Paris basement, and sold them to the US Library of Congress in 1948. All photographs Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Prokudin-Gorskii Collection.

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In pictures: Russian Empire in colour photos

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