Gezicht op Union Square en het St. Francis Hotel na de aardbeving in San Francisco 1906

This stereograph by Tom M. Phillips captures a scene of Union Square and the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco after the earthquake, likely with a camera and a whole lot of patience to get the composition just right. Imagine Phillips, setting up his equipment amidst the rubble, trying to frame the devastation. He must have been thinking about how to convey the scale of the disaster, the fragility of the buildings, and the resilience of the people. There's a tension between the starkness of the black and white and the textures of the ruined buildings, the debris scattered across the square. That shoe advertisement looming over the scene—I wonder if it felt like gallows humor at the time? In a way, artists are always in conversation with each other, across time and space, riffing on themes, responding to each other's ideas, and inspiring new ways of seeing the world. It's a reminder that art is never created in a vacuum.