Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: The colour photos which show a different side to early-20th century Russia

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Google is commemorating Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky – a man who, much like the search engine itself, catalogued distant lives and information and brought them back home.

Prokudin-Gorsky was an innovator not just in taking photographs but making them, too, and he would go on to become famous for both the technological and anthropological work he did to document the Russian empire.

But Prokudin-Gorsky's work was preserved with the help of a number of other people. He relied on the support of Tsar Nicholas II, who helped with the travel that allowed him to document such vast swathes of the country, and of the large number of archivists who have kept his pictures safe and available until the present day.

Taken together, the archive left by Prokudin-Gorsky amounts to a stunning document of early 20th century Russia, and the techniques that were used to take them.

The pictures themselves mostly date from between 1909 and 1915. They show the rich diversity of the vast country – an area that at the time stretched 7,000 miles across, made up one-sixth of the land mass of the planet, covered 11 different time zones and was the biggest empire ever seen on Earth.

They depict the lives lived by the people who lived in Russia. It documents the various things that surround them: sacred architecture, important icons and religious objects, public works and infrastructure such as trains and bridges, agriculture, cities as well as the clothes the people wore and the lives they lived.

All of them are shown in vivid colour, preserved in albums and negatives that have survived until this day.

But the subjects tell only half the story. Prokudin-Gorsky's achievements were not only in the pictures he took but how he managed to take them.

He was skilled in the chemistry involved in photography, and used that to reflect colours in the vivid hues and clear sharpness that can be seen in the images. He took the photos using the latest technology – including techniques that he helped crafted himself.

He did so using his early training as a chemist, that blossomed into a lifelong commitment to photography. Born in Murom, which is near Moscow, he studied with scientists across Europe.

He used that knowledge to undertake original research, which included techniques and patents for producing rich colour film slides and projecting them in the same vivid hues.

Born in Murom, Russia (near Moscow), in 1863 and educated as a chemist, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii devoted his career to the advancement of photography. He studied with renowned scientists in St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Paris. His own original research yielded patents for producing color film slides and for projecting color motion pictures.

Sometime around 1907, he came upon the idea to use those technologies to painstakingly document the Russian Empire in which he lived. He did so using the most modern technology: he travelled in a specially equipped darkroom that was carried in a railroad car provided by Tsar Nicholas II, and was given permits that allowed him to access restricted areas throughout the empire.

He combined the technological insight with his studied of people and took the pictures on tour, giving lectures and using his studies to educate children and other citizens on the far and distant parts of the Russian empire.

Today, a huge number of the images are preserved in the US Library of Congress. Thanks to new techniques, those pictures have been digitised and added to the library's online collection – meaning that anyone can pick through the thousands of pictures that have been restored.