Call Building aan Market Street in San Francisco tijdens een brand na de aardbeving van 1906 1906

This silver gelatin print, made by W.J. Street, shows the Call Building during the fire that followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Looking at this image, I think about how to represent something that’s in motion. Fire is something you can’t really hold, it’s evanescent. Here, the dark plumes almost seem to rise out of the building, like a ghost escaping its earthly confines. Street captures that instant when the city is at its most vulnerable and most transient. The camera has this amazing ability to grab something fleeting and make it stay. It’s interesting to think about the photographer who took this. What was it like to be there, witnessing such devastation? Did they feel a sense of responsibility to capture this moment for posterity? The fire hoses in the foreground feel so small against the scale of the architecture. Street is in conversation with other artists who work with photography, and all of us who try to use images to capture moments that otherwise would disappear forever.