The Prokudin-Gorskii collection

I sometimes joke that a lot of history happened in black and white. And that round about the turn of the century, people moved in a funny, jerky way.

shezan, in a series of terrific posts, has saved me the effort of writing about the plates from the collection of Mikhail Prokudin Gorskii. Between 1905 and 1915, Gorskii travelled across imperial Russia, taking pictures. It's only in the past few years that these plates have been colourized. They are remarkable.

The following links lead to very big pictures. shezan starts with a summary of Prokudin Gorskii's life in this post. The colours in these pictures are startling. More here, with this great insight: "The result is this calm, reflective view of the land and its inhabitants. It is the reverse of jingoistic imperialism; landscape as horizon rather than frontier."

Natasha Walter on fanfic

The eagle-eyed and excellent katlinel delivers another link into my inbox, this time to an article on fanfic by Natasha Walter.

"Later in life you work out how to become an onlooker of art, but in childhood you are free to live inside the stories you love."

(And some of us never bothered to get out of the sandpit.)

"The writers of fan fiction recapture that childish bravado, those easy movements from one narrative to another and in and out of real life. As they reweave these stories they remind us that the boundary of the published book, and the control exerted by the individual author over a tale, is a relatively recent phenomenon for art, both in history and in our individual lives.

Indeed, when it comes to fan fiction, the internet is giving us back something like an oral society, in which people can retell the stories that are most important to them and, in so doing, change them. For all the dross and smut they produce, these communities in which readers become writers, fans become creators and old tales become new, also give out blasts of energy. And they remind us that the power of these fantasy worlds are not built just on profit and loss, but on imagination responding to imagination."