Century-old Color Photographs and Cognitive Dissonance
The Boston.com Big Picture blog has a subset of the photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Remarkable.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html
Funny how a familiar technology in an unusual context can produce such an odd impression.
It’s a very strange and rather hard to explain feeling that comes from breaking the unconscious linking, born of experience, of “past” to “black and white”. My first unconsidered impression on seeing these photos, this color out of context, is that the photographs are … somehow staged, which is absurd, of course. Then the consideration begins….
Since I was a kid, I’ve often wondered what exactly “real life” looked like in 1942 for example when my dad came to the US for the first time (and took photos that I’ve seen), or in the 1910s (from which I’ve seen photos of my grandparents). What did people in the late 1800s experience when they walked around. Or for that matter, in the year 200?
I can tell myself that, yes, what everyone saw and experienced was just like what I see now but with the different trappings of time and location. Reality is reality, always has been, and it’s all in color. No different from now in any great way. But even after that intentional, intellectual exercise, there remains the sense that it must have been different; after all, it existed in black and white, didn’t it? People back then mush have experienced some kind of fog or fuzziness between themselves and their world, since that is what I see now of that time….
These photos here shoot those impressions all to hell and so I’m left with some sort of cognitive dissonance, a difficulty in accepting that the past I’ve always thought existed as different is actually similar to my present. I haven’t quite yet accepted that, but I’m beginning to see the people in these photographs as people I share a reality with.
