Disaster Panorama

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At first glance you might assume that this photograph of San Francisco, taken a little more than a month after the massive earthquake and subsequent fire had wiped out most of the city in April 1906, was shot from an airplane. After all, more than two years had passed since the Wright brothers had first flown. But neither photography nor aviation had yet advanced enough to allow such a clear, sharp image to be made from a moving plane. And none of the world’s handful of pilots had even reached the 2,000-foot altitude from which the photo was snapped.

That leaves a hot-air balloon as the only possibility, right? Indeed, this would have provided a relatively stable platform for a photographer, and balloonists had already soared to more than 8,000 feet. Photographers had been taking photos from balloons since the French artist Nadar made a blurry daguerreotype over the Bièvre Valley in 1858. Yet that’s not how this image was created either.

The truth is, the man responsible for the photo never left sea level. His camera was suspended from a kite—or rather, from a chain of kites, flown from a ship in San Francisco Bay. A commercial photographer named George R. Lawrence designed, built, owned, and operated the camera, and it was almost certainly the largest one ever carried aloft this way. It weighed 49 pounds and exposed a sheet of film measuring 18 by 48 inches, almost 650 times larger than today’s common 35-millimeter format.

Lifting so much weight with a kite was nothing new. Kite technology had evolved considerably in the 1890s, with some pioneers even constructing versions large enough to carry a human passenger. And this photo wasn’t the first one taken from a kite; that honor was claimed by a Frenchman, Arthur Batut, in the 1880s. But Lawrence’s image—which, thanks to his perfectionism, is a hauntingly clear standout —marked the zenith of the esoteric field known as kite aerial photography, and it showed the world what a true catastrophe looked like.

The effort behind the photo had begun more than 2,100 miles away, in Lawrence’s hometown of Chicago. When word arrived that a massive earthquake had struck San Francisco, he realized that the sprawling ruins would offer the perfect aerial photo opportunity. Lawrence had spent years figuring out the best way to get a camera airborne, nearly killing himself more than once in the process. Asked to photograph the Chicago stockyards in 1901, he had gone aloft in a tethered hydrogen balloon only to plunge more than 200 feet when the platform supporting him collapsed. He managed to escape injury only because telephone and telegraph wires broke his fall. After another balloon accident in Minnesota a few weeks later, he began pondering ways to snap images from the air while keeping his feet on the ground.

The epiphany came one day when he gazed up at a large advertising banner trailing from a kite sailing over Michigan Avenue. He started building kites of his own and linking them together to lift a heavy camera. To hold it steady in a wind, he designed a cradle to mount the camera. Fifteen-foot horizontal poles extended from the cradle in three directions, a long weighted cord hanging from each to act as a sort of airborne anchor. He called the apparatus a “captive airship,” and soon it was snatching photos of subjects barely worthy of the dramatic angle, such as Fort Sheridan, near Chicago; the cities of Waukegan and Chicago Heights; and some irrigation projects.

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As mundane as this work was, it helped Lawrence gain the attention of the federal government. President Theodore Roosevelt thought kite photography might serve the Army and Navy by permitting reconnaissance of enemy troops and fleets beyond the horizon, and in August 1905 Lawrence boarded the USS Maine to spend two months demonstrating his technique. Photos could be made fairly quickly this way (a Navy officer reported that the procedure took about 90 minutes from the launch of the first kite to the return of the camera with exposed film), but officials found the whole system less useful than they had hoped, says Tom Yanul, a Chicago photographer and amateur photo historian who has built several large panoramic cameras.

Lawrence was an autodidact who had already shown an impressive penchant for novelty. In the 1890s he devised a kind of flash photography usable indoors, a practice previously outlawed in many places, despite the huge demand for banquet photography, because of the volatile nature of flash powder and the copious amounts of smoke it produced. At the Paris Exposition of 1900 he received the “grand prize of the world for photographic excellence” for a gigantic 1,400-pound camera (still the largest ever made) he had built on commission from the Chicago and Alton Railroad to capture an entire train in a single, immense horizontal image. The leviathan used an 8-by-4.5-foot glass negative plate and required 15 people to operate.

Tall, with a handlebar mustache, Lawrence was a born risk taker who shrugged off his lack of formal education as he tested and tweaked his inventions. He admitted he knew “nothing of chemistry,” and he permanently damaged his hearing and blew one of his sons out a window while laboring to perfect his flash-powder mixture. “In all my life I never started anything I did not finish,” he once told an associate. Born in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1868, he had demonstrated unusual mechanical ability as a child by constructing sleighs, making a gun with his own forge, and fashioning a primitive washing machine. The motto he chose for his photo business befitted his expansive nature: “The hitherto impossible in photography is our specialty.”

Arriving in San Francisco, Lawrence and his five assistants saw a level of destruction hitherto unthinkable. The quake had lasted 47 seconds and measured as high as 8.3 on the Richter scale, and it flattened boardinghouses on sleeping tenants and turned entire districts to rubble. Gas lines had ruptured and fires had broken out. There was even one report of residents torching their own damaged properties, which were insured against fire but not earthquake. With water mains shattered, the blazes had soon merged into a single inferno that sent thousands fleeing across the bay to Sausalito. After three days city officials had stopped the blaze only by blasting a firebreak around it with dynamite.

Although the official death toll from the disaster was eventually set at 450, the modern historian Gladys Hansen suspects at least 3,000 perished. “An enumeration of the dead will never be made,” wrote the novelist Jack London, who went to the city to see the conflagration firsthand. “All vestiges of them were destroyed by the flames.” More than 28,000 buildings were incinerated, and 225,000 of the city’s 400,000 residents were left homeless. As darkness fell on the smoking ruins, Mayor Eugene Schmitz warned citizens that looters would be shot dead.

Lawrence wasn’t the only photographer who hurried to the city after the tragedy. Reporters and amateurs took to the streets with their Brownies and Premos. Some found compelling compositions from high vantage points like the wrecked dome of City Hall, and images of urban devastation not to be witnessed again until World War II appeared in newspapers around the country. A San Francisco Examiner photographer named Harry Coleman even tried to ascend in a balloon, but his feeble craft sank to the ground before he could take a single shot.

Kites were up to the task. Wandering past piles of charred rubble, Lawrence made photos from four locations in the city, his kites hoisting his bulky camera into the sky like a team of reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh. Exhausted San Franciscans, sifting through debris and lining up at soup kitchens, gazed at the long string of sails and surely thought the grown men flying them were a bunch of callous fools.

But the famous photo almost never happened, for out on the water that afternoon the elements seemed bent against Lawrence. One by one he and his crew sent 17 kites aloft before finally attaching the camera and carefully letting it ascend. A light rain was falling, and the water disrupted the mechanism he had developed to trip the shutter by sending an electric current up the line to the camera. Over and over he activated the release while an assistant watched for a small white metal flag to flip up on the camera, indicating a successful exposure.

At last, sunlight streaked through the broken clouds, drying the line and making the wrecked city luminesce. Lawrence hit the switch, and the flag went up. The image captured at that moment soon showed up in newspapers and magazines, making plain the scope of the tragedy while earning the photographer about $15,000 (the equivalent of more than $300,000 today).

Thanks to the great size of the negative, the amount of detail in the photo seems as infinite as its fading horizon. Visible in a full-size contact print but less so in the reproduction shown here (which is a small fraction of the size) are horse-drawn wagons trundling past piles of detritus and serried rows of soldiers’ tents. Even pedestrians can be made out. In the foreground, steamers idle at the Ferry Terminal; far past them up Market Street, surrounded by entire blocks pulverized and burned to the soil, City Hall, the U.S. Mint, and, in morbid irony, the California Casket Company remain standing but badly damaged. Because of the extreme wide angle of the lens, the city’s famously hilly topography appears deceptively flat, as if the quake had leveled out the bedrock itself.

At the time, the photo’s aerial perspective must have seemed almost incredible. It must have captivated and humbled viewers much the way the first images of Earth from space did more than a half-century later. Artists had been simulating aerial landscapes by trying to imagine such a vantage point for centuries, but here at last was the real thing, and depicting a subject whose awesome scope demanded nothing less.

Likewise, coming before photography truly emerged as a fine art and after an age largely defined by the idealized landscape paintings of the Hudson River school, Lawrence’s masterpiece was cruelly objective. American painters had gazed ever westward with verdant, sun-drenched visions of the nation’s manifest destiny; here was a thematic about-face, a grim urban chiaroscuro looking back from the coveted Pacific at the last morsel of land and the result of humankind’s obsession with conquering it.

Lawrence, newly famous, spent the next couple of years accepting assignments for aerial surveys of cities, landscapes, and factories. Then, after an elaborate 1909 expedition to Africa, where he took photos of lions and other jungle beasts, he suddenly abandoned photography and founded, of all things, an aircraft manufacturing firm. Over the following decade he designed five aircraft—once again with no real training—before most of the aviation industry collapsed when government contracts dried up at the end of World War I.

He kept working on various inventions, including an automatic starter for automobiles and a rudimentary air-conditioning system that he used to cool his home. After suffering a stroke, he continued to earn a small amount of money analyzing camera lenses. He died in Chicago on December 15, 1938.

Today Lawrence’s work is forgotten and lost, save for a few prints owned by the Library of Congress and Tom Yanul, but aerial kite photography has experienced a renaissance over the last decade as the Internet has given artists a forum for sharing ideas and showcasing their work. Today’s hobbyists use much smaller and lighter cameras than Lawrence’s, sling them from kites in custom-built harnesses, and trigger their exposures via wireless remote controllers (though in some homespun rigs the shutter is tripped automatically by contraptions involving oven timers, Silly Putty, or even melting ice).

Scott Haefner, a Bay Area photographer and Web site designer who took up kite photography three years ago, uses a digital camera, but despite its capacity for high-resolution images, the level of detail he gets still “doesn’t even come close to approaching what George Lawrence was doing,” he says. To mark the centennial of Lawrence’s San Francisco photos, a kite association called the Drachen Foundation plans to have Haefner take some commemorative aerial shots, possibly from the same locations Lawrence used.

Even if Haefner had a camera the size of Lawrence’s, he couldn’t repeat the famous panorama. The Federal Aviation Administration now prohibits kites weighing more than five pounds from flying higher than 500 feet. H