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Market Street, Flood Building

In the latter half of 1906, a few months after the disastrous 1906 earthquake hit the city of San Francisco, a photography innovator named Frederick Eugene Ives came to the city to record the tragedy. He saw the event as an opportunity to work with his new invention, the Ives Photochromoscope system, a device which produced an image its creator christened the Kr�mogram, a series of single-color plates which, when combined together and seen through a stereoscopic viewer (the Kr�moscop!), created a 3-D color image.

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RGB

Ives' system never gained traction - it was expensive, complicated and Ives himself was not a gifted marketer - but the images remain, passed to the National Museum through Ives' son. They lay in storage until a museum volunteer, Anthony Brooks, called attention to them during an inventory of holdings.

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Van Ness Avenue, City Hall

Using modern photographic digital imaging technology, the museum has recreated what it would have been like to view Ives' images through his patented Kr�moscop viewer.

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Sutter Street

The 3-D effect came from viewing the side-by-side images through a binocular-like viewing device that aligned the color plates in front of a very bright light, like the sun or an arc light.

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Near City Hall

Only a handful of images of the quake scene were found in Ives' archive of 250 Kr�mograms.

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Northeast View

Ives made this image from the top of the Hotel Majestic, where he was staying during his time in the city.

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Market Street, Flood Building

Since the pictures required long exposures, moving objects, like people and trolley cars, blurred between the system's layers. The panel on the right shows what Ives' system would have rendered, while the panel on the left, supplemented by an added black and white layer courtesy of digital imaging technology, brings us closer to the true scene.

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Cemetery Hill

The images may be the first color photographs of San Francisco of any kind, and are very probably the only color images of the earthquake's aftereffects.

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Southwest View

What is most startling about the photos, suggests archive volunteer Brooks, is that we are accustomed to seeing images of the 1906 earthquake in black and white, when, in fact, those who lived through it saw it in color.

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