40 Years of Photography Destroyed by Hurricane Sandy
The stories that continue to surface about the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy include photographer Randy Taylor, who lost almost the entire archive of his work that spanned nearly 40 years as a result of the deadly storm.
Taylor kept his archive in a storage facility and wasn’t allowed
access to it until a few weeks after the storm. He had initially
received word that some damage might have occurred, but when he finally
gained access—by donning a hazardous materials suit and mask—he found a
much more severe scene. “I descended into the smelly, wet, and dark
bowels of the powerless building, which had flooded floor-to-ceiling
with contaminated water,” Taylor said via email. “What I found was a
jumbled, gooey mess of papers and things 3 to 8 feet high. It took the
first day to carve out a vertical space just 2 feet into the unit, so I
could merely walk in the door.”
Taylor’s effort to salvage what he could of his work was a
painstaking process. The combined destruction of water and mold was so
intense that he was only able to recoup several dozen images out of
30,000 stored in eight filing cabinets, he said. Taylor wrote about the
recovered images, which he estimates to account for fewer than 0.1
percent of the total images in the storage unit, in The Picture Professional.
Those images were part of Taylor’s busy career. His first year as a
working photographer on staff at the Associated Press in Paris was in
1977; that same year, at age 21, he was considered for the Pulitzer
Prize with his photograph of a shootout
at the Iraqi Embassy. At his busiest, Taylor was published an average
of 100 times a month. Some of the destroyed images included photos of
natural disasters, “all having met the same fate as the subjects of
those photos,” he said.
The images seen here were the random assortment of images Taylor had
time to rescue. He said he had no real selection or editing process
other than saving whatever he could as quickly as possible. Taylor’s process
involved dipping each image in rubbing alcohol in order to clean off
the mold and halt further destruction, though they are likely still
deteriorating at some rate.
On top of everything else Taylor lost—including photo equipment,
computers, financial records, worldwide press clippings from his
career—he says the loss of family photos was the most hurtful. “For
decades, everyone had given me their images because I had become the de
facto genealogical archivist of the family history. I feel like I failed
my ancestors,” he said.
“On a positive note, I've been elated by the attention my Sandy art
has attracted. Magazines, websites ... It's been satisfying to have my
images noticed again. Thanks to Sandy, they are truly unique,” Taylor
said about his post-Sandy legacy.
Prints of Randy Taylor’s work, including the one-of-a-kind Hurricane Sandy images, can be ordered via his Photoshelter site. All photographs © Randy Taylor
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