Google Art Project launched this week, putting the work of art museums around the world online in a consolidated place. Using Google’s Street View technology, you can walk around the galleries and look at the art on the walls. At launch, museums include Tate Britain, MoMA, the National Gallery, the Van Gogh Museum and many more. For me though, the best part of this is the high resolution images of the artwork. You can zoom in on paintings like Van Gogh’s Field with Flowers near Alrles so far that you can see every brush stroke. Seeing images in a text book or in a standard Google search lets you get the layout of a picture. But looking at the work close up lets you see how the art was really made. That’s what I love most when I get to see art in person. Google Art Project recreates that experience when you can’t see the art in person – or when the museum is so crowded you can’t see it once you get there.

A preview of Google Art Project.

Behind the Scenes.

Read more

• Google Art Project
• Tate Britain’s experiences launching their collection in Google Art Project, and why they did it.

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Today, photographs are taken from devices in our pockets, then beamed to a worldwide audience in a matter of moments. At the dawn of photography, the equipment was large and cumbersome, developing glass plates to reveal images was an intense process, and color, of course, didn’t exist. To take photos required an expedition of many to haul all this equipment, often at great expense. Simple black and white photos involved lots of labor to produce.

So add to this a great invention – shooting in color, before the invention of color film. This was accomplished by shooting three images, one quickly after the other, each with a red, blue and green filter over the lens. After the film was developed, they could be projected using three magic lanterns, also with red, green and blue filters, overlapping to recreate the color image. This is the screen plate color process. Prokudin-Gorskii had studied the technology in Germany, but invented his own camera and projectors for his photographs.

From 1909 to 1915, before the invention of color film, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii won the support of Tsar Nicholas II to set out on an expedition to photograph the Russian Empire. By 1918, the Empire had fallen, and Prokudin-Gorskii was living in Paris. In 1948, after his death, the Library of Congress bought the entire collection from Prokudin-Gorskii’s heirs.

Here are some examples of the collection. To view the entire collection, visit The Library of Congress – The Empire that was Russia, The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated.

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