Opvang na de Aardbeving in San Francisco 1906

This photograph, titled Opvang na de Aardbeving in San Francisco, was captured by Tom M. Phillips. It's a moment frozen in time, really, and I think the grainy blacks and whites feel so raw and immediate, even now. The way the image is constructed, the texture almost feels like a drawing, a series of small marks laid on top of each other. It's like the artist is trying to find the form, feeling around, as if the tragedy is something they are still trying to grasp. Take a look at those bare trees reaching up to the sky. The scratchy lines remind me of Cy Twombly's drawings. You can almost feel the tension in this scene, the way the figures bunch together, the dust, and the waiting. Art is often about this kind of search, it’s about what we can learn from the past, how we can look at something from one hundred years ago and relate it to our modern lives.