Originally published in 1856, George Robinson Fardon’s San Francisco Album is the earliest existing photographic record of an American city. An unmatched historical document of San Francisco during its years of rapid growth and burgeoning prosperity in the wake of the Gold Rush, the album is aesthetically compelling as well. Fardon (1806-1886), arrived in San Francisco at age 43. He is credited with introducing the wet collodion photographic process to California and experimented with paper photographs as a means for wide distribution of his pictures.
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California Street, San Francisco by G. R. Fardon (1856)
North side of Montgomery Street, from California to Sacramento, San Francisco by G. R. Fardon (1856)
Telegraph Hill, taken from corner of Stockton and Sacramento streets, San Francisco by G. R. Fardon (1856)
View down Sacramento Street, San Francisco by G. R. Fardon (1856)
View down Stockton Street, San Francisco by G. R. Fardon (1856)
View from Kearny street – in the foreground the Orphans’ Asylum, San Francisco by G. R. Fardon (1856)
City Hall, San Francisco by G. R. Fardon (1856)
East side of Montgomery Street, San Francisco by G. R. Fardon (1856)
Kearny Street, San Francisco by G. R. Fardon (1856)
Merchants’ Exchange, on Battery street, San Francisco by G. R. Fardon (1856)
Montgomery Block, Montgomery Street, San Francisco by G. R. Fardon (1856)
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