NEW BOOK OUT THIS MONTH

I started this forum for any collecting hobby and it turned into my camera collecting and using forum. I use it mostly to keep a record of my photo adventures. Nobody but me seems to have photo adventures that visit here....but however. I have so many cameras now that I forget which is which and which ones work and which ones don't. If you have cameras and adventures you would be welcome to post here.

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NEW BOOK OUT THIS MONTH

Post by DuncaninFrance » Sun Nov 07, 2021 3:40 am

City on fire: astonishing unseen photos of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
Arnold Genthe’s pictures have all the eye-popping drama of a Hollywood disaster movie

By
Lucy Davies
7 November 2021 • 5:00am
Spot the family in the right of this shot, sitting outside their ruined home
Spot the family in the right of this shot, sitting outside their ruined home CREDIT: Library of Congress

In the immediate aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake – the chandelier above his bed still swinging “like a pendulum” – Arnold Genthe’s first thought was not for his priceless collection of Chinese porcelain, or the thousands of glass negatives stacked in his studio on the floor above. No, his first thought was for breakfast.

“I have often wondered, thinking back, what it is in the mind of the individual that so often makes him feel himself immune to the disaster that may be going on all around him,” wrote Genthe, in his 1936 autobiography. “I know that this was so with me.”

On that April morning, he made a beeline for the St Francis hotel on Union Square – only to find that many of the city’s 410,000 residents, now without water or electricity, had had the same idea. Some were still in evening dress (the first tremors struck at 5.12am), others in their night clothes, but “somehow hot coffee was available”, Genthe recalled, and so he and two friends settled in.

If this were a film, about now you’d begin to suspect that the hero’s reprieve was only temporary. And you’d be right. The quake, felt from southern Oregon to Los Angeles and inland as far as Nevada, had measured 8.3 on the Richter scale. The fire that swept up from the waterfront and burnt for three days afterwards peaked at 2,700F (1,482C). Buildings destroyed: 28,000. City blocks levelled: 498. Retail value of alcoholic drinks destroyed by city officials to help prevent looting: £36,000. Death toll? Well, they estimated 500 at the time, though analysis in the 1980s suggests it was closer to 3,000.

As for Genthe, whose photographs of the disaster are published in a new book – the majority for the first time – he lost his home, his furniture, his clothes, his books, his paintings and the entire contents of his fashionable Sutter Street portrait studio.

Great Shakes: Howard Street, San Francisco after the quake
Great Shakes: Howard Street, San Francisco after the quake CREDIT: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

What he absolutely did not lose, though, was his enthusiasm for photography. Having got his hands on a folding Kodak – “Take whatever you want!” his camera dealer told him, “this place is going to burn up anyway” – and stuffed the pockets of his khaki riding jacket with film, he started out towards the smoke, “a lurid tower visible a hundred miles away”, as the author Jack London would describe the view, seen from his Sonoma ranch.

Almost immediately, Genthe took a spectacular photograph. The vertiginous view, down Sacramento Street and out towards San Francisco Bay, includes a house on the right whose entire façade has collapsed on to the pavement. Look closely and you can see gilt-framed paintings still hanging square on sprigged wallpaper, above dark Biedermeier furniture.

The most startling feature of his picture, though, is the house’s former occupants sitting calmly on dining chairs in the street, watching Armageddon unfold. Below and to the left, hundreds of people stand gazing at the heaving cloud of smoke. As the fire crept closer, Genthe recalled, “they would just move up a block”. For years thereafter, he added, people seeing the picture “would exclaim, ‘Oh, is that a still from a Cecil DeMille picture?’ To which the answer has been, ‘No. The director of this scene was the Lord himself.’”

“Genthe’s photographs are far and away the most poignant first-hand account of the earthquake,” says Karin Breuer, a curator for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The institution includes the city’s Legion of Honor, the museum that purchased Genthe’s original negatives of the disaster on his death, in 1942 (the rest of his archive went to the Library of Congress).

A hot meal kitchen set up on Market Street
A hot meal kitchen set up on Market Street CREDIT: Fine Art Museums of San Francisco

“He almost always includes people, and there will be an angle or a hook that draws you immediately to that human being. Sometimes, you even make eye contact with them.” Other photographers at the scene “did not succeed in capturing the reality of it at all,” Breuer adds. “Their photographs feel flat; commercial.”

The city happened to be overrun with photographers at the time. The San Francisco Chronicle calculated there were 5,000 “picture-seekers” across California in the late 1890s, and its branch of the distinguished Camera Club was thriving. Many cashed in on the demand for images; Genthe was not one of them. He printed only a handful of his earthquake pictures in his lifetime, and exhibited none. His reasons remain a mystery that “we have just not been able to crack”, says Breuer. “But I think it just wasn’t the kind of photography he wanted to be known for. By the time of the earthquake, he was well established as a society portraitist.”

Genthe’s wealth may have been another factor. Born in Berlin in 1869, he had gone to the US at the age of 26, with a PhD in classical philology, to work as a tutor for the children of the immensely rich Von Schroeder family. His first negatives were developed in their attic.

“He made quite a splash in society,” says Breuer, “because he was Dr Genthe, from Europe, because he was well travelled and because he was a bachelor. He also had this quirky, quite bohemian side to him. He belonged to lots of artistic clubs, and the Jack Londons of the era he found very attractive.”

Sarah Bernhardt on a tour of the ruins, with the former City Hall in the background
Sarah Bernhardt on a tour of the ruins, with the former City Hall in the background CREDIT: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The new book, Among the Ruins, presents all 170 of Genthe’s earthquake pictures. Previously, only around 30 had been in circulation – the handful he printed, and a further 22 that the Legion commissioned Ansel Adams to print in 1956. The new, ultra-high-resolution digital scans reveal detail in the negatives that hadn’t been apparent in the early prints.

Most of the prints that Genthe made, he gave to Sarah Bernhardt, the actress with whom he had toured the earthquake’s damage zone in the month following the disaster. She had been performing on the west coast and made the trip especially. Genthe recorded how he was summoned to her hotel to show her the pictures, and that she later wrote to thank him for “the beautiful and very painful photographs. You too lost everything in the horrible catastrophe.”

Union Street
Union Street CREDIT: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The east coast actors Edward Sothern and Julia Marlowe also wrote to Genthe, offering “a fully equipped studio waiting for you” in New York. “The temptation was great,” Genthe admitted, “but I wanted to stay, to see the new city which would rise out of the ruins. I felt that my place was there. I had something to contribute, even if only in a small measure, to the rebuilding of the city.”

Breuer says she has “always found his determination to stay quite poignant. In his old age, he said that breathing the San Francisco air healed him. He had a deep affection for the city, a physical reaction to it that he never lost.”

Among the Ruins (Abrams, £35) will be published on November 25


I HAVE HIGHLIGHTED THE IMAGES IN THIS ARTICLE IN RED in case this link doesn't work to the Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what- ... rd-journey
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Re: NEW BOOK OUT THIS MONTH

Post by Niner » Sun Nov 07, 2021 9:54 am

The Telegraph won't let me see without a subscription. I think these must be all of the same photos at a site that doesn't require a subscription. Great historical shots for sure.

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/ ... ke/477750/
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