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Christa Zaat





Arnold Genthe (German-Amercan photographer) 1839 - 1942
San Francisco Earthquake April 18 1906, 1906
photograph
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., United States of America

Looking Down Sacramento St., 1906. [verso:] "San Francisco: April 18, 1906." From As I Remember by local photographer Arnold Genthe: This photograph shows "the results of the earth quake, the beginning of the fire and the attitude of the people." It was taken the morning of the first day of the fire. Shows Sacramento St. at Miles Place (now Miller Place) near Powell St.
"I found that my hand cameras had been so damaged by the falling plaster as to be rendered useless. I went to Montgomery Street to the shop of George Kahn, my dealer, and asked him to lend me a camera. 'Take anything you want. This place is going to burn up anyway.' I selected the best small camera, a 3A Kodak Special. I stuffed my pockets with films and started out.... Of the pictures I had made during the fire, there are several, I believe, that will be of lasting interest.
There is particularly the one scene that I recorded the morning of the first day of the fire [along Sacramento Street, looking toward the Bay] which shows, in a pictorially effective composition, the results of the earthquake, the beginning of the fire and the attitude of the people. On the right is a house, the front of which had collapsed into the street. The occupants are sitting on chairs calmly watching the approach of the fire. Groups of people are standing in the street, motionless, gazing at the clouds of smoke. When the fire crept up close, they would just move up a block. It is hard to believe that such a scene actually occurred in the way the photograph represents it.
Several people upon seeing it have exclaimed, "Oh, is that a still from a Cecil De Mille picture?" To which the answer has been, "No. the director of this scene was the Lord himself." A few months ago an interview about my work--I had told the story of that fire picture--appeared in a New York paper with the headline, "His pictures posed by the Lord, says photographer.""

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-Arnold Genthe, "As I Remember" Reynal & Hitchcock : New York, 1936; Chapter 10: Earthquake and Fire
"On 18 April 1906, the morning of the great San Francisco earthquake, Genthe, with his cameras and studio destroyed, borrowed a hand-held camera and photographed the destruction across the city. Of his over 180 surviving, sharp-focus photographs of San Francisco, probably his most famous image is "San Francisco, April 18th, 1906," which shows a view from Nob Hill, down Sacramento Street. Enormous clouds of smoke ominously approach, buildings' facades have collapsed from the quake, and residents stand and sit in the street, in a stupor, calming watching the approaching fire."

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Born in Germany to a family of scholars, Genthe was a recent Ph.D. in classical philology when he came to the United States in 1895 to work for two years as a tutor. On his days off, he walked the streets of Chinatown in San Francisco, where he began to photograph. After publishing some of these images in local magazines, Genthe decided to open his own studio, specializing in portraits of prominent locals and visiting celebrities. Genthe's work and studio were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and resulting fire--save for the Chinatown images that had been stored in a bank vault. He published those early images in the 1909 book Pictures of Old Chinatown. After the fire, Genthe re-established his studio in San Francisco and in 1908 spent six months photographing in Japan. In 1911 he moved to New York, where he continued to work as a successful portrait and pioneering dance photographer. With New York as his new home base, Genthe also traveled and photographed throughout Europe and the United States.