The lights went out in the great hall of the Tsarskoye Selo Palace; The Emperor, members of the royal family and all those gathered saw color images on a large white screen: flowers, landscapes, children’s faces. The spectators were delighted. When the session ended, the author of the collection S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky excitedly told Nicholas II about his grandiose project “All Russia.” The history of photography is in many ways the history of discoveries and inventions that became milestones on the way from a massive wooden camera to a compact digital camera, from long printing processes to copying a picture in one movement of the hand. In Russian culture there was a photographer and scientist, a popularizer of photography as a sphere of art and a subject of science, who made a great contribution to world artistic practice.