A Polychrome Glimpse Through Time

Over the course of the past week, the first (and probably only) color photos have hit the internet of San Francisco in the wake of the 1906 earthquake. They were taken by Frederic Eugene Ives, an early proponent of color and 3D photography and an inventor whose halftone process is still used for newspaper and magazine photographs today. The images were intended for use with his own Krömgram system, a cumbersome and expensive system of producing color 3D images that could be viewed through the device seen above. The color imagery was created with a process that used mirrors and filters to create separate slides for each primary color of light, which were bound together in a special order with cloth tapes. The Krömgram was a commercial failure: the viewing device cost $50 when it came out in 1907 (equivalent to $1000 today), was complex to operate, and according to Smithsonian photography curator Shannon Perich, suffered from "poor product placement and advertising." These photos, then, largely represent the last legacy of the failed format, but they're a remarkably contemporary-feeling look into a bygone era (or for that matter, century/millenium).

Most of the reproductions of these images floating around the internet are extremely low quality. You can find the full resolution files from the Smithsonian archives here; below, you can see smaller resolution versions of those images as well as a few details that I found particularly amazing. The first was taken from the roof of the hotel where Ives was staying at the time of the quake, the Majestic (still extant, at 1500 Sutter St.):

 Magnification of the rubble skyline...

...and a house either already being reassembled or having picked a tragic time to begin construction.

Photo 2, taken from the neighborhood of City Hall:

Photo 3, taken at Van Ness Blvd.:

Three close-ups of remarkably clear ads:

The last two photos, stills of Market St. produced from a slightly different angle from the same spot. The still-standing Flood Building is prominent in the foreground, and the Ferry Building can be made out just out by the horizon:

And in this particularly touching set of contrasts, the enlargement on top is of a man wandering Market St. and a cable car off in the distance, while the bottom shows both of them, perhaps by some Krömgram fluke, vanished into a yellow haze - rather like the former skyscrapers that lay in ruins around them.