ASU Herberger College School of Art Faculty:
2006-2007 Exhibition

April 14 through September 9, 2007

MARK KLETT

Mark Klett
Waiting hotel van, corner of Stockton and Geary Streets (left)
Untitled (the burned window of the St. Francis Hotel). Courtesy Bancroft Library, University of California (right)
Ink-jet photograph
26 x 60" framed
Courtesy of the artists, from the exhibition After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006, rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, organized by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Legion of Honor.  Dec. 17, 2005 – June 4, 2006.

Mark Klett

On April 18, 1906, a major earthquake and fire destroyed more than half of the city of San Francisco, killing and displacing thousands of its residents. Until hurricane Katrina, this was the county’s largest urban disaster. The city was rebuilt over the ruins and little evidence of the event remains today.

However, for the first time the details of a large-scale natural disaster were preserved in photographs made by non-photographers, working anonymously with newly available Kodak cameras. An image base of several thousand 1906 photographs survive and bear powerful witness to the forces of destruction. Mike Lundgren and I worked over a two-year period to research, select, find and rephotograph over 80 of the original scenes depicted in these photographs. The combined images from both centuries became the exhibition and book After the Ruins, Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire 1906 and 2006 shown during the centennial observance of the earthquake at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco - Legion of Honor (December 2005 to May 2006).

The right half of this diptych shows the Palace Hotel with fire-blackened windows. In spite of being gutted, the building survived and can be seen in the left half of the diptych, a photograph that was made from the same vantage point as the original but with a wider-angle lens. The image of a woman’s face from a poster on an adjacent building is reflected in the window of a hotel van. The face stares back at the viewer, and for me the feeling of being observed seemed to dissolve any assumption of safe distance the passage of one hundred years could afford. There was an uneasy bridge between being an observer of history and a participant in an inevitable future.

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