After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006.

Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. Photographs by Mark Klett. With Michael Lundgren. Essays by Philip L. Fradkin and Rebecca Solnit. Interview with photographer and Karin Breuer.

University Of California Press, Berkeley, USA, 2006. 140 pp., 52 color and 56 duotone illustrations, 2 maps, 2 double gatefolds, 11x10".

How exactly has San Francisco's urban landscape changed in the hundred years since the earthquake and cataclysmic firestorms that destroyed three-quarters of the city in 1906? For this provocative rephotography project, bringing past and present into dynamic juxtaposition, renowned photographer Mark Klett has gone to the same locations pictured in forty-five compelling historic photographs taken in the days following the 1906 earthquake and fires and precisely duplicated each photograph's vantage point. The result is an elegant and powerful comparison that challenges our preconceptions about time, history, and culture. "I think the pictures ask us to become aware of the extraordinary qualities of our own distinct moment in time. But it is a realization that a particular future is not guaranteed by the flow of time in any given direction." So says Mark Klett discussing this multilayered project in an illuminating interview included in this lavishly produced volume, which accompanies an exhibition at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006 features a vivid essay by noted environmental historian Philip Fradkin on the events surrounding and following the 1906 earthquake, which he describes as "the equivalent of an intensive, three-day bombing raid, complete with many tons of dynamite that acted as incendiary devices." A lyrical essay by acclaimed writer Rebecca Solnit considers the meaning of ruins, resurrection, and the evolving geography and history of San Francisco.

Copub: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Klett is obsessed with time: time in its scientific/mathematical sense; the subjective experience of time; the philosophical nature of the past, present and future; and memory as a marker of change. Repeatedly, he has returned to the well of photographic history, particularly the charged history of the American West, weighing the past against the present via rephotography. After the Ruins is both a return to and a completion of this artist's deliberate widening of his own temporal horizons. In 1990, Klett published One City Two Visions, a rephotographic panorama of the San Francisco skyline (the 1878 original was by Eadweard Muybridge). In both images, the city appears sunny and prosperous. This latest book is more unsettling on many levels, partly because its points of departure are archival images of disastrous destruction and its aftermath. By setting up his camera as close as the art and science of rephotography can get to the 1906 photographers’ (the most well-known of whom was the professional portraitist Arnold Genthe) original viewpoints, Klett is able to draw attention to emblems of the past tucked into the present-day city. Strangely, the overall feel of the 21st-century pictures is made somewhat insubstantial by their placement next to twinned scenes of ruin, shot at similar times of day, 100 years earlier. The viewer questions the materiality, the solidity of our present world; long-gone destruction feels real—modern cabs and buses and people hanging out in the park appear strangely wispy. The book employs only two of the wonderful “embedded” panoramic images used to such good effect in Third Views, Second Sights (2004) and Yosemite in Time (2005), but they have the same disorienting effect here. The past is plunged into the present, setting memory adrift like a yellowed ghost, wandering through the public square in the midday sun. As Klett seems to have intended all along, the flowing future, present and past begin to feel less and less like settled facts, and more and more like open questions. PHIL HARRIS

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