Earthquake Imagery

First I’d like to say that our hearts go out to the Japanese people and their families during this difficult time. The images piped into our living rooms of the disaster is nothing short of heartbreaking. For those ready and willing to donate, I’d like to suggest the Red Cross. While donating to the Red Cross is donating to the organization as a whole, with the Red Cross you always know your money isn’t going into unscrupulous hands. If you are interested in specifically donating to the people affected by this month’s earthquake and tsunami, contact your local chapter to see if they have set up a fund or you can donate directly to the Japanese Red Cross.

Especially those Americans that have ever lived in the West Coast, we can definitely say we’ve been there and we empathize. We all remember the San Francisco quake in ’89, and that imagery of the highway that had collapsed on itself. San Francisco was also rattled by a big earthquake in 1906. While no one living today remembers that particular incident, the Smithsonian Institute has recently uncovered photographs taken just after the 1906 quake. The images were shot by photographer and inventor Frederick Ives and here’s a curveball: they are in color. The images are possibly the first color photographs ever taken of San Francisco. The photos were also meant to be in 3-D when viewed through a special viewer Ives made. Quite the innovator, that Ives. The images are moving in multiple ways, both as a revisit to the destruction of the earthquake and offering a sense of nostalgia at seeing a city in color for the first time.

Fredrick Ives’ photograph shows the damaged Flood Building