Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Oakland firestorm that killed 25 people and destroyed 3,800 residences. The catastrophe predated digital cameras, but that hasn’t stopped the community from scanning and uploading photographs into Flickr.
The California Emergency Management Agency (CalEMA) was gracious enough to add some of their archive to our group. Some Flickr users have uploaded their photos too, including some incredibly haunting black and white images by Ellen Soohoo and some dramatic color images by Mary MacTavish.
We started a Flickr Pool for archive photos here, so if you have some you’d like to share, please join the group and add yours.
If you haven’t already seen them, the Oakland Museum of California and BAM/PFA are showing a new exhibit of photographs by Richard Misrach, which “have remained in storage with limited visibility to the public.” The museum made a selection available to the media to use, which are in the slideshow below, produced by our web intern Michelle Gachet.