Photos they did have 100 years ago in Russia too. But to manage to see ordinary peasants’ cheeks blush and how their clothes were really so colourful, it makes you realize how flawed our vision of the past has become due to the limitations of black & white technology.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944), a chemist, but also a photographer, managed to bring these old photos to life with the help of color-filtered plates of glass. So what we have here is a collection of photos taken in the Russian Empire from 1909 until 1912, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Photos from Library of Congress.