San Francisco in Ruins
San Francisco in Ruins

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With film plate curved in back and lens
fitted low on the front, Lawrence's camera specialized
in panoramas. To photograph an entire city was a
challenge in 1906.

Circa 1904. Chicago Historical Society.

Simon Baker

The 1906 Aerial Photographs
of George R. Lawrence

THE YEAR was 1906, and the citizens of San Francisco must
have found it a wildly incongruous sight--grown men at
child's play in the midst of tragedy. Less than three weeks
before, the earth had shaken and the city had burned. The
disaster began with an earthquake in the early morning of
Wednesday, April 18, and when the fires were extinguished
three days later, at least two hundred thousand San Francisco
residents were homeless. Yet on the afternoon of
May 5, a small group of men was flying kites near Folsom
and Sixth streets.

The man in charge, George R. Lawrence, was anything
but mad. As soon as news of the disaster had reached
Chicago, he made plans to go to San Francisco with his
Captive Airship and crew. With the Captive Airship he
knew he could take aerial photographs of the prostrate city
that no one else in the world could take. He was gambling
by going to the devastated. city, but he took the chance
knowing there would be an international market for his
photographs if he succeeded. Lawrence was, first and
foremost, a commercial photographer.

For his Chicago company he had adopted the slogan,
"The Hitherto Impossible in Photography is Our Specialty."
By 1906 this self-taught photographer from a northern
Illinois farm had already demonstrated that his slogan
was no idle boast. In 1895 his dissatisfaction with current flash
guns led him to formulate brighter flash powder as well as
a method for synchronizing a series of flash charges by
connecting them in an electrical circuit. Five years later at
the Paris Exposition he won the "Grand Prize of the World
for Excellence in Photography," a distinction he achieved
by building the world's largest camera to photograph a
newly designed train for the Alton Railroad. The giant
camera weighed fourteen hundred pounds when loaded
and held glass plates eight by four-and-one-half feet. A
huge contact print from one of these plates won the prize.




Here much reduced, the original photograph is forty-seven
inches wide, a contact print from a single negative the same
size. Above Folsom Street between Fifth and Sixth, position 1,
the airship gazed north over A) City Hall, B) the post office,
C) California Casket Company, D) Market Street, E) the U.S. Mint,
F) the Fairmont Hotel, G) the ruins of the Emporium department
store, and H) the Call Building. George R. Lawrence, 1906.
Library of Congress.



In his everyday business Lawrence distinguished himself
from other commercial photographers by carrying out
assignments using large-format cameras he built himself.
With these cameras he could photograph whole banquet
groups, national political conventions, and state legislatures
in session. Outdoors he captured the crowds and
action at baseball games, horse races, and football games.
He also photographed entire industrial plants on single,
large contact prints.



Angle was all-important in his outdoor work, so Lawrence
used guyed ladders and a collapsible tower of wood
and wire to hold his cameras aloft. When even this equipment
could not provide a suitable point of view, tethered
balloons filled with hydrogen lifted him and his camera.
During one aerial assignment over the Chicago stockyards
on 21 June 1901, a mishap almost cost him his life. When
he had completed his work nine hundred feet above the
ground, he signaled to be hauled down. At about two
hundred feet the gas bag broke free and Lawrence fell. In
the Chicago Tribune a reporter explained that Lawrence's
fall was partially broken by a network of telephone and
telegraph wires, although he fell another thirty feet from
the wires to the ground. Lawrence was badly shaken but
unhurt. After a second balloon mishap a month later in
Minnesota, he began searching for safer ways to raise his
cameras.

In 1902 Silas J. Conyne, a Chicago inventor, patented a
kite for flying advertising banners. Lawrence was impressed
by its stability and lifting power, so he obtained permission
to build some of these kites. Before powered flight many
people around the world were experimenting with kite
designs and flying techniques, and for Lawrence, kites
were a useful alternative to balloons. He improved existing
techniques for flying a series of kites attached by short
cords to the main line. With this kite train he could hoist
large panoramic cameras, as well as a stabilizing mechanism
he designed, two thousand feet. Lawrence could fly
as many as seventeen kites in a train, although five to ten
usually sufficed.

Lawrence also devised a way to steady his cameras
while making exposures. A mount hanging below the
lowest kite in the series allowed him to fix the camera in
any direction before sending it up. In the air, a system of
booms, lines, and lead weights prevented the camera from
turning horizontally while at the same time lessening the
camera's tendency to swing. Lawrence solved the problem
of tripping the shutter by incorporating an insulated wire
into the steel kite line and using it to carry an electric current
to the camera. The sum of all these parts he named
the Captive Airship.

At the heart of the system were the cameras, which
Lawrence built himself of wood and aluminum. The ones
he designed for aerial work were modifications of two types
of commercial cameras then in use. On the first, an ordinary
flat-plate, fixed-focus lens camera, Lawrence replaced
the usual leather bellows with a rigid box. On the second,
a panoramic camera with a curved film plane, Lawrence
mounted the horizontally swinging fixed-focus lens on
vertical pivots. This camera covered 160 degrees in the
sweep of the lens, producing extremely wide-angle photographs
and unusual perspectives. Because the cameras
were mounted level, they always pointed at the horizon.
In order to record as much of the ground as possible, Lawrence
fitted the lenses below the horizontal midlines of the
film plates. Lawrence made panoramic cameras in several
sizes for a variety of purposes. The one he apparently used
for the San Francisco photographs weighed forty-nine
pounds and held a celluloid-film plate about twenty by
forty-eight inches.

In 1905 the Captive Airship came to the attention of
President Theodore Roosevelt, who saw it as a possible
reconnaissance tool for the army and navy. At his request,
Lawrence conducted several demonstrations, including a
test aboard the battleship Maine off the New England coast.
In spite of initial interest, the navy never purchased a
Captive Airship.





If the camera was an eerie sight from below, it captured
another one from above. Ruins of the city stand in sharp
detail. The bulge in the foreground street grid heightens
our sense of displacement; an effect not of the earthquake
but of the curved negative. From above Hyde and Green streets,
position 2 on the map, the airship surveyed A) Russian Hill,
B) the tower of the Union Ferry Building, C) the Fairmont
Hotel, D) the dome of the Call Building, and E) City Hall.
George R. Lawrence, 1906. Library of Congress.

IN SAN FRANCISCO

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire provided
the next major opportunity for Lawrence to demonstrate
the Captive Airship's special capabilities. The people of
San Francisco had endured a major earthquake and suffered
the largest fire in the history of the country. Their
beautiful city was in ruins. Lawrence realized that the true
magnitude of the disaster could be documented only on
the huge curved plates of his airborne panoramic camera.
The news from San Francisco convinced him he could
make a photographic record the likes of which the world
had never seen.



The disaster had begun with a powerful, minute-long
earthquake at 5:13 A.M. Wednesday, April 18. Almost
immediately after the main shock, fires broke out all over the
city as chimneys collapsed, electrical wires fell, gas lines
ruptured, and stoves overturned. A vivid day-by-day
account of the fire is recorded in A History of the Earthquake
and Fire in San Francisco written in 1906 by Frank W. Aitken
and Edward Hilton. They report that the last blaze was
finally extinguished on the waterfront near Telegraph Hill
on Saturday afternoon, April 21, three days after the earthquake.
In the four square miles of ruin, only a few buildings
and two small enclaves were saved. Some twenty-five
thousand buildings had been destroyed, and 438 people
had been killed.

When George Lawrence arrived a few weeks later, he
and his crew prepared to photograph the burned area
from several locations and altitudes. Working in San Francisco
during May of 1906 must have been difficult, but
Lawrence succeeded in making four photographs, copies
of which survive in the Prints and Photographs Division of
the Library of Congress.

Lawrence's photographs have an unusual perspective
because the film was fitted over a curved plane. When we
view a flat print made from the curved negative, the areas
directly in front of the camera appear the largest and most
detailed, while those at either side seem to fall away in the
distance. The scene is convex, bulging toward the camera.
The streets in the foreground are actually straight, but in a
cylindrical-plate photograph they seem to curve.

The extremely wide angle is another distinctive characteristic
of Lawrence's photographs. As far as we know, Lawrence
never wrote a description of the Captive Airship and
camera, so to determine the angles of view I checked features
in the photographs against maps of San Francisco at
several scales as well as reports and books showing buildings
and their locations. I thus deduced the approximate
camera positions and view angles of the four photographs
of the burned area. With the exception of one photograph,
the average view angle is about 130 degrees.





Surviving landmarks attest that the scorched blocks in the
photographs were indeed San Francisco. Numbered points show
the camera positions and angles of the four views. Adapted
by the author from U.S.G.S. Bulletin #324, 1907.


The huge size of the photographs made a great impression
on viewers then, just as it does today. Three of the
four prints average forty-seven inches by nineteen inches.
Lawrence, it must be emphasized, did not produce these
big photographs with an enlarger; they are contact prints.
Each one invites close inspection of its details: people in
the streets, horses, wagons, tents, piles of rubble, and
remains of buildings. Everything but the horizon is in
sharp focus.
VANTAGE POINT
In the days of primitive motion pictures and no television,
the impact of Lawrence's photographs was tremendous.
His view of San Francisco from two thousand feet
above the bay created a sensation around the world. At the
turn of the century, aerial views taken from balloons or
kites were fascinating because they showed perspectives of
landscape few humans had ever seen. Airplanes were still
at an early stage of development, and it would be at least
two decades before photographs made from them became
common. George R. Lawrence's photographs differed
from others taken from the air because his were many
times larger and encompassed wide areas of view. Undoubtedly,
some people were impressed by Lawrence's
mastery of photographic technology, but most viewers
probably responded to the images because they were
exceptional portrayals of an extraordinary event. Lawrence
reputedly earned $15,000 just from selling prints of his
view of San Francisco from two thousand feet over the bay,
single copies sold for $125.

The copies reproduced here are meager representations
when we consider the richness of the large originals.
In them we see people going about their business in the
streets or looking up at the Captive Airship; horses and
wagons stand amidst piles of rubble; neat rows of tents
shelter the homeless. All the details of a stricken city slowly
returning to normal life are clearly visible. The prints record
a landscape of destruction not seen again until World
War II, when aerial views of bombed and burned cities
were widely reproduced.





San Francisco's four-day fire finally burned itself out near
Telegraph Hill, point A. Lawrence's 130-degree panoramas
conveyed the scope of the damage as no other report could.
Looking southward from map position 3, this view also
encompasses B) Yerba Buena Island, C) the Union Ferry
Building, D) the Fairmont Hotel, E) the Call Building,
F) the post office, and G) City Hall. George R. Lawrence,
1906. Library of Congress.


The memory of George R. Lawrence and his work has
faded since his death in 1938, and little has been written
about him. In the first decade of this century he stood
alone in the quality and innovation of his work. No other
kite or balloon photographer produced images like those
he made routinely. A master of photography who combined
technology with his own ideas to produce the prints
shown here, George R. Lawrence remains an American
original.





This novel aerial perspective drew world attention. Flown
two thousand feet above the bay, the lens scanned the
waterfront. Beyond are A) the Call Building, B) Twin Peaks,
C) City Hall, D) the Union Ferry Building, E) the Fairmont
Hotel, F) the Appraiser's Warehouse enclave, G) Russian Hill,
H) the Golden Gate, I) Telegraph Hill. G. R. Lawrence, 1906.
Library of Congress.

For an extremely high-resolution version of this image, click here: 
11709 x 44716 pixels (20 Mb).


FURTHER READING

Frank W. Aitken and Edward Hilton. A History of the Earthquake and
Fire in San Francisco. San Francisco: Edward Hilton Co., 1906.

W. H. G. Bullard, A. L. Willard, and J. H.
Holden. Report to the Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. 12 January 1906, Record Group 74, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

L. H. Chandler. Report to the Chief of Bureau of Ordnance, U.S. Navy.
22 May 1905, Record Group 74, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

David Starr Jordan, ed. The California Earthquake of 1906.
San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1907.

"George R. Lawrence, Biography." Encyclopedia of Photography.
New York: Greystone Press, 1974

Beaumont Newhall. Airborne Camera. New York: Hastings House, 1969.

"The '02 Version of the U-2." National Photographer,
August 1969, pp. 417-19.

H. H. Slawson. "$15,000 Photograph." Popular Photography,
March 1939, pp. 30-31.

"Kite and Balloon Photography." Encyclopedia of Photography.
New York: Greystone Press, 1974.

U.S. Geological Survey. The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of
April 18, 1906 and Their Effects on Structures and Structural Materials.
Bulletin no. 324. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1907.


This article first appeared in the Landscape magazine,
Volume 30, Number 2, Summer 1989.





