Views that can shockl

HOW do you fit Hell on Earth into a museum?

Ask Corey Keller, assistant photography curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and she’ll point out an old anonymous shot of stoic San Franciscans on a fractured city street after the great quake and fires of 1906.

“I love this picture,” Keller says, looking at the scene of off-kilter homes and buckled pavement along Dore Street. “Can you see the guy who’s in the sidewalk? It’s up to his neck. And I love how the distortion of the camera adds to the topsy-turviness of the scene.”

You can see that picture as basic disaster documentation, says Keller, or you can squint just a little and see it as part of a pivotal moment in the history of photography -- the first mass American photo op.

Meanwhile at the Legion of Honor across town, photographer Mark Klett has taken the same Hell-on-Earth challenge in an entirely different direction.

Commissioned by contemporary art curator Karin Breuer for a show that will be on display through June 4, Klett first studied thousands of 1906 damage photos and maps. Then he chased down more than 50 new views that precisely match old images, a methodology that not only links past and present but, in his meticulous presentation, nods ominously toward the future.

Call these aftershocks. It was on April 18, 1906, that California’s most notorious earthquake half-leveled San Francisco, and throughout the Bay Area, curators and historians have been chasing down images and artifacts, assembling theses and putting up shows.

The largest show, a 4,000-square-foot overview stressing personal stories, will open April 1 in Oakland at the Museum of California History. A few blocks from Union Square, the California Historical Society is looking over the shoulder and through the viewfinder of celebrity quake tourist Jack London, who raced around the region with his wife and a camera, then filed an account to Collier’s magazine for a lordly 10 cents per word. The Berkeley and Stanford libraries are weighing in with exhibitions, as is the Society of California Pioneers. (More info on those shows and other events is available at www.1906centennial.org.)

But it’s the Keller and Klett shows, both hanging now, that take many of the disaster’s most striking images and place them in new contexts. Here’s the weird geometry of Market Street laid to waste, as seen from the Ferry Building tower. There’s City Hall, suddenly skeletal. Over there, a Nob Hill panorama of ashes and rubble.

The effect of these shots, dusted off a century later and placed amid a 21st century California affluence that’s been largely built on seismic denial and the art of image-making, is a compound jolt.

The 1906 quake hit just after 5 on the morning after San Francisco’s best and brightest had turned out to hear the visiting tenor Enrico Caruso sing in “Carmen.” Immediately the water system failed, leaving firefighters largely helpless through three days of firestorms. (Some tried blowing up buildings to slow the fire. It didn’t work.)

In the end, Philip L. Fradkin reports in his 2005 book “The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906,” 508 city blocks burned and an estimated 3,000 people died. The shaking lasted 40 to 60 seconds. Since expert estimates of the magnitude vary widely, it may help to forget the Richter scale and consider this: That 1906 temblor may have let loose 32 times as much energy as the 1989 Loma Prieta quake did.

Afterward, the mayor ordered troops to kill looters. The city’s richest men took control of reconstruction, shouldering most elected officials aside. As many as 225,000 San Franciscans lost their homes -- about half the city’s population -- and many spent months in canvas tents. The city’s boosters, eager to rebuild fast, left building codes unchanged and mounted a public relations campaign to blame most of the mess on fire, not shuddering earth.

The San Francisco quake was far from the first American disaster on film. As Keller notes, early photographers found their way to the battlefields of the Civil War, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the Galveston hurricane of 1900.

But as Keller gathered the 100 or so images that SFMOMA will show through May 30, she found herself dwelling on two points:

First, because of its hilltop vistas, seaside location and burgeoning growth and affluence, San Francisco was already one of the most photographed cities in the country. So when news of the disaster spread, homegrown and far-flung commercial photographers came running to produce postcards, panoramas and the dual-image photos known as stereoviews.

Second, says Keller, Eastman Kodak had only introduced its mass-market Brownie cameras to the public a few years before. Most people didn’t have cars yet, but with Brownies going for about a dollar each, many had cameras. So this was the first American disaster to be covered thoroughly by professionals and amateurs -- in Keller’s words, an “unprecedented pictorial record of the destruction of an American city.”

Thinking along those lines, Keller amassed a group of photos that just about evenly split between uncredited amateur images and work by professionals such as Willard Worden and Arnold Genthe. Genthe, a man about town who had been at the Caruso performance the night before, later told the story of his quake pictures in an autobiography.

All his cameras were ruined in the initial quake, Genthe wrote, so he went to the Montgomery Street shop of his dealer, George Kahn, and asked to borrow some equipment.

“Take anything you want,” Kahn told him. “This place is going to burn up anyway.”

Genthe grabbed a 3A Kodak Special, “stuffed my pockets with films and started out. It was only then that I began to realize the extent of the disaster which had befallen the city.”

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Images from on high

ANOTHER professional on the scene was George Lawrence, who rushed west from Chicago after the quake and quickly devised a plan to get aerial shots.

“He had 17 kites tied together, and he called it a captive airship,” Keller says. To trip the camera’s shutter, Lawrence sent an electric pulse up a wire into the sky.

The result is a series of astonishing images from as high as 2,000 feet. Because the negatives were so large -- about 16 inches high and 48 inches wide -- the prints in the show, on loan from the Library of Congress, hold startling detail.

But the ground-level pictures, the ones with people in them, hold their own surprises.

As Keller wrote in an essay that accompanies the show, the faces in these 1906 pictures are bound to lead many onlookers to thoughts of another American city, much-romanticized and much-photographed, that saw nearly half of its population displaced a few months ago. In flooded New Orleans, still and video photographers captured legions of stranded victims, every unhappy emotion written on their faces -- images that forced federal officials to abandon their press-conference efforts to paint a pretty picture.

The ruins of San Francisco in 1906 look nothing like that, even when fires are advancing in the background. In virtually every shot that shows a face, “everybody looks remarkably composed,” Keller says.

To understand why, she adds, bear in mind that 100 years ago, most photographers didn’t see the camera as a tool for the collection of fleeting moments among unaware subjects. The conventions and technology of that time demanded posed and formal compositions, even when your block was burning. (It’s worth noting, also, that police and federal troops in 1906 got early orders to shoot anyone breaking any law; and that for months after the catastrophe, the city’s boosters did their best to reassure investors by circulating images of a plucky population, itching to rebuild.)

If the images of besieged New Orleans in 2005 seem “perhaps more real than those made in San Francisco in 1906,” Keller asserts, “it is because the conventions of photography -- of photojournalism in particular -- have changed dramatically. Human nature, on the other hand, and human tragedy have not changed much at all.”

This is an idea to savor and carry across town to Klett’s show at the Legion of Honor -- an exhibition built around the idea of photography as a constant and the city as an ever-evolving organism.

Not that Klett is an intimate of the city. In fact the photographer, 53, lives and teaches in Tempe, Ariz.

But since the late 1970s, he has made a specialty of rephotography, the art and science of finding previously photographed sites and recapturing them. He calls it “a tool for getting at space and time and change.”

Over the years he has applied this technique to unbuilt sites in Yosemite National Park and throughout the American West. Sixteen years ago, he re-shot a set of 1878 Eadweard Muybridge San Francisco panoramas. But what persuaded him to undertake the new project, Klett says, was the sense of deja vu he got when he looked hard at a set of 1906 images.

In 1995, he’d been near Kobe, Japan, when a devastating quake hit that city. Scanning those old San Francisco images, he says, “I thought, ‘Whoa, this is exactly what I was seeing in Kobe.’ ”

Once the museum agreed to throw itself behind the project, Klett went hunting for sites, including many shot by Genthe, whose original glass lantern slides are owned by the Legion of Honor. (Fifty years ago, the museum observed the quake’s 50th anniversary by commissioning Ansel Adams -- a lifelong San Franciscan whose nose was broken at age 4 by an aftershock of the 1906 quake -- to make a new set of Genthe prints.)

In one pair of pictures, two African American couples stand on Clay Street, dressed for a formal affair and staring soberly at the camera as great smoke plumes rise behind them -- plumes that rise from just the spot where the city’s signature Transamerica Pyramid would later rise.

In another pair, shot from the Ferry Building tower, the 1906 ruins of Market Street are superseded by a new geometry of skyscrapers, palm trees and crosswalk stripes and, in the foreground, two angled bars of seismic bracing.

When the 200th anniversary of that quake is observed and somebody pulls out his pictures for a close look, says Klett, “People are gonna go, ‘What was Nike? What was a Nissan Sentra?’ ”

But Klett’s reshooting, which took about six weeks, wasn’t easy. One challenge was simply matching views.

In his work in natural settings, Klett had grown accustomed to spending most of his energy looking for signs of change -- a tree grown here, a rock broken there. In San Francisco, he says, “it’s just the opposite. Everything is so completely different that you wonder: How could this be the same place? Then you find one little thing, the corner of a building.”

But that led to the next challenge. For many of his best images, Genthe had ventured inside the fallen walls of buildings, then shot outward toward the streets -- impossible shots, in a cityscape of intact buildings. So Klett and collaborator Michael Lundgren spent a lot of time on sidewalks and in the streets.

“That was a big problem, just to get into the street and not get run over,” Klett says. “We’d walk out into the street and line it by eyeball, then go back with a tripod and try to line it up while the light was red, then put duct tape where the tripod went, then when the light was red again come back with the tripod and the camera.”

Along the way, Klett says, he thought more and more about the cyclical nature of life in quake country, about a Japanese saying he’d heard in Kobe: shikataganai (“nothing can be done”), and the way buildings rise and fall and rise again.

The result might look like a historical project, says curator Breuer, but it’s really “about contemporary art looking back and thinking about history.”

One element of that is the way Klett has set up the pairings. In many cases, he has printed new photos in black-and-white to closely resemble the 1906 images of the same locations. And in many pairings, instead of placing quake images on the left and new images on the right in the standard before/after contrast, Klett has reversed the order. So a left-to-right viewer sees contemporary San Francisco first and then fuming rubble.

This is just the way the photographer likes it. So when he was reshooting one landmark building and a taxi rolled into the picture bearing the slogan “this way to your future,” Klett knew it was time to trip the shutter.

“I’m looking for layered stuff,” he says, “that helps you understand there’s a recurrent event here.”

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Quake revisited

“After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire”

Where: Legion of Honor, 100 34th Ave., Lincoln Park, San Francisco

When: 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday

Ends: June 4

Price: $10 for adults

Contact: (415) 750-3600 or www.legionofhonor.org

Also

“1906 Earthquake: A Disaster in Pictures”

Where: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., San Francisco

When: 11 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. Friday to Tuesday;

11 a.m. to 8:45 p.m. Thursday

Ends: May 30

Price: $12.50 for adults

Contact: (415) 357-4000 or www.sfmoma.org