Photography of our world 100 years ago is just about all black and white. And while there are many, many beautiful century old photographs, the fact that they were B & W, or sepia-tone, puts us at a vast distance, not only in time, from the reality captured in those images.
Which is why these extraordinary colour images by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky from the first decades of the last century feel so jolting. They don't look 100 years old, they look like work of someone who has just stepped out of a time machine with a digital camera and uploaded the files to Flickr.
Here, for instance, is the only colour portrait of the brilliant Russian writer Leo Tolstoy :
I won't further spoil the surprises waiting for you if you haven't already seen these images.
