Sorry Cath and I have slowed down this week. Civic duty abounds in the AsianCajun household: Cath has been working late hours (Strategic Planning for the City of Decatur- woohoo) and I’ve had jury duty!

In between sitting through voir dires and thinking about a vision for Decatur in the next ten years, I’ve been reading about central Asia. My bf and I plan to hit up at least Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan next year, so I’m trying to brush up on my central Asia history (when I say “brush up,” I mean “learn from scratch”- apart from some Genghis Khan references in high school, I knew very little about The Stans and Mongolia).

Here’s where the abbreviated art history lesson comes in! Guess how old this photo is:

Here’s a hint: this man is the last emir of Bukhara (in what is now Uzbekistan). I know! That wouldn’t have helped me either!

It’s taken in 1911. 1911!!! The most amazing thing is that this photo was not doctored in Photoshop or even tinted back in the day by the original photographer. Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky received permission from the (last) czar, Nicholas II, to document the Russian Empire. Not only did Prokudin-Gorsky take over 3500 photographs (about half have survived and are housed at the Library of Congress), he also found a way to kinda/sorta take/create colored photographs while traveling around an exhaustive empire. He actually had a dark room built in a train car. Pretty spiffy, non?

I think black and white photography is beautiful, informative, and sometimes haunting, but there is something about seeing a subject in color that makes them seem more present and alive.

Here are a few more examples of Prokudin-Gorsky’s work to delight your workweek-wearied eyes:

These photos also capture the diversity in the Russian Empire/current central Asia.

We hope you guys have a lovely weekend! We’re off to Baltimore (and then to the beach for Cath) for a friend’s wedding- ’tis the season! What do you guys have planned?

ps- You can see a complete visual listing of photographs here. For larger images, enter the number in the LOC search bar.

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