With the project “Photography. Inventing Color,” ROSPHOTO opens the first galleries of its permanent exhibition, which will occupy the entire third floor and will be dedicated to the history of photography.

The exhibition tells the story of the emergence and development of color photography: the scientific experiments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the first color photographic images; slides and negatives that appeared in the mid-1930s; and the era of digital photography.

The project features a reconstruction of the famous projection device of Sergey Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, whose name is closely associated with the birth and development of color photography in the Russian Empire. This apparatus, created specifically for the ROSPHOTO museum, allows visitors to see early twentieth-century color photographs exactly as they were presented to the public more than a century ago. The installation demonstrates how three black-and-white positives combine to form an image “in natural colors,” as Prokudin-Gorsky himself described them.

One of the exhibition halls presents Russian and international photographic materials used in the twentieth century to produce color images: Svema and ORWO films, the most popular and accessible among Soviet amateur photographers, as well as the legendary Kodachrome, favored by professional photographers. 

A special section of the exhibition is devoted to digital photography — to the ways in which the recording and reproduction of color have changed with the development of technology, to the appearance of images taken with digital cameras of the late 1990s, and to how contemporary cameras are able to capture optical effects inaccessible to the human eye.

An important component of the project is the work of contemporary artists. Some of the pieces were created specifically for ROSPHOTO and explore the artistic application of the physical processes and phenomena once used in color photography.

The main exhibition is complemented by temporary displays of original objects from the museum’s collection, demonstrating the diversity of color printing techniques and individual artistic interpretations.

Thus, the history of color photography is presented simultaneously through its artistic and technological evolution.

Visits to the exhibition are organized in timed sessions.

Project Team