George Lawrence
Oversized Panorama Taken from a “Captive Airship” showing the Ruins of San Francisco, 1906
Linen-backed silver print
18 x 48 inches
With Lawrence's credit and title in negative, and manuscript text to recto.
With Lawrence's credit and title in negative, and manuscript text to recto.
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Massive, dramatic panoramic photograph surveying the devastation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. There is a caption in the negative which reads “Bird’s Eye View of the Ruins...
Massive, dramatic panoramic photograph surveying the devastation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. There is a caption in the negative which reads “Bird’s Eye View of the Ruins of San Francisco from Captive Airship 600 feet above Folsom Between Fifth and Sixth Sts. By George Lawrence Co. Chicago.” There is also a large manuscript caption which reads, “Anniversary - April 18th - 19 years ago.” Also present on the image are faintly-legible captions in red ink, noting various streets and buildings. This is one of three panoramic views created by the photographer and inventor George Lawrence.
When Lawrence’s striking, large-scale views first appeared before the public, they were decried as fakes. Though aerial photographs had existed as early as the 1860s, his panoramic scenes, captured from 2000 feet in the air, seemed too detailed to be anything but a highly-sophisticated composites. However, Lawrence’s Chicago-based photo studio had a motto: “The hitherto impossible in photography is our specialty,” and that was exactly the case here.
After experimenting with different methods of capturing large-scale, birds-eye view photographs (including a hot air balloon contraption that nearly got him killed), Lawrence devised a way to send a train of up to seventeen kites into the air, in order to lift a custom-designed, forty-nine-pound panoramic camera. The shutter was set-off by an electrical current transmitted through the metal kite line, and a small parachute would be released to indicate the picture had been taken.
To create his San Francisco panoramas, according to an article published Cabinet Magazine:
“Lawrence stabilized his bulky camera with three fifteen-foot-long bamboo poles attached to its sides (these had to be cropped off or retouched out of the corners of his pictures); from each of these a 120-foot silk cord was hung, and these joined together to support a three-pound weight that helped prevent the camera from swaying in the wind. The camera had a nineteen-inch focal length, and the impressive depth of field was achieved by having the camera’s shutter taper from half an inch at the bottom to four inches at the top, so that when the lens swung through its 160-degree arc the murkier distance was exposed for eight times as long as the brighter foreground.”
Lawrence's images were not only an artistic success but a financial one as well, his photographs appeared in newspapers around the world and generated more than $15,000 for the photographer.
When Lawrence’s striking, large-scale views first appeared before the public, they were decried as fakes. Though aerial photographs had existed as early as the 1860s, his panoramic scenes, captured from 2000 feet in the air, seemed too detailed to be anything but a highly-sophisticated composites. However, Lawrence’s Chicago-based photo studio had a motto: “The hitherto impossible in photography is our specialty,” and that was exactly the case here.
After experimenting with different methods of capturing large-scale, birds-eye view photographs (including a hot air balloon contraption that nearly got him killed), Lawrence devised a way to send a train of up to seventeen kites into the air, in order to lift a custom-designed, forty-nine-pound panoramic camera. The shutter was set-off by an electrical current transmitted through the metal kite line, and a small parachute would be released to indicate the picture had been taken.
To create his San Francisco panoramas, according to an article published Cabinet Magazine:
“Lawrence stabilized his bulky camera with three fifteen-foot-long bamboo poles attached to its sides (these had to be cropped off or retouched out of the corners of his pictures); from each of these a 120-foot silk cord was hung, and these joined together to support a three-pound weight that helped prevent the camera from swaying in the wind. The camera had a nineteen-inch focal length, and the impressive depth of field was achieved by having the camera’s shutter taper from half an inch at the bottom to four inches at the top, so that when the lens swung through its 160-degree arc the murkier distance was exposed for eight times as long as the brighter foreground.”
Lawrence's images were not only an artistic success but a financial one as well, his photographs appeared in newspapers around the world and generated more than $15,000 for the photographer.