Can you believe this photograph dates from 1910?

It was taken by Pyotr Ivanovich Vedenisov in Yalta in the 1910s, using the technology of the Lumière brothers.

Pyotr Vedenisov graduated from the Moscow Conservatoire in 1888, moved to Yalta and spent the rest of his life there as a pianist, local historian, meteorologist and amateur photographer with a serious approach to the business. He subscribed to scientific journals from Paris and kept abreast of novelties, and when the Lumière brothers patented the autochrome process in 1903 and put the plates on sale in 1907, Vedenisov was among the first to reach for them.

The principle of this "colour photography" was as follows: a layer of dyed potato starch grains was applied to a glass plate, and over it a light-sensitive emulsion. After development the result was a colour transparency in a single copy, which could not be printed on paper.

Such pictures could be viewed only against the light or by projecting them through a lantern onto a screen. Vedenisov turned these showings into entire performances: musical evenings at his home went hand in hand with a display of autochromes, which in those days produced roughly the same effect as a good installation in a museum does today.

He photographed those closest to him: his wife, her mother, the Kozakov relations with their five children, musician friends. Picnics, feasts, Christmas trees, Crimean views, an estate in Simbirsk Governorate. No official documentation and no formal portraits, only the everyday life of people who do not yet know that within a few years all of this will come to an end.

One hundred and fifty glass plates have survived to this day, and they are now held in the Alupka Museum-Reserve and the Moscow House of Photography.