The eye perceives, the mind relates. A camera may, for instance, cast a cyan shadow over a cold winder snow field. A human sees no cyan. Is it there? Maybe the cold produces it in the camera, I don’t know.

It is nevertheless true that snow is always white, no matter what period of history is in question. The whites of a healthy person’s eyes, a dense cloud, a whitecap on the sea, all make a gray point, which is to say, their RGB values are identical. Adjust for this. The rest of the colors tend to follow, and the mind does the rest.

My point is that we have no way of knowing accurately what colors he a) recorded and b) reconstructed because it depends on precisely the red, green and blue filters he used. The reconstructions by the Library of Congress are one visualization of this information. The projected images P-G created are another. No image will be exactly what he saw. We should admire his work, but there is no way for it to tell us what color the sky really was.

My comments apply to all photography. When you use a camera to capture a scene, you encode the light and color at each point in a way that depends on the film (or digital sensor) and the exposure. You then create an image based on that encoding, either in the darkroom or with a program like Photoshop. Good photographers make adjustments in both the capture and the reconstruction, applying their skill to get what they consider the best result possible.

It’s tempting to say to oneself, for example, “the sky couldn’t possibly be that blue.” Of course it could, this was rural Russia before industrialization and pollution. I suspect that P-G’s aim was to create as realistic an image as he possibly could, and overall I think he did admirably.

thanks

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