For about a year, I’ve been collecting vintage flood photography. So, what’s up with that? It’s an impulse that I haven’t really felt like examining. But let’s go for it….

I’d say it definitely has something to do with climate change. How could it not? Flooding—either due to sea level rise or increased precipitation—is what’s on the horizon. The future is watery. It’s a lot of other things too, (“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain,” is feeling pretty prescient). But it’s not about the literal floods, so much as seeing our civilization transformed.

In these photos, you see street signs rising from water, people entering homes through the second floor, and vast swaths of landscape rendered both surreal and abstract. On one hand, things are where they don’t belong. A row boat is on the street next to a car, as in the photo above. On the other, lines are newly reflected and shapes emerge, like looking at the city through a kaleidoscope. Climate change is changing our society in ways less obvious than a flood. So, the image of a flood will need to carry some of the weight of these other alterations.

I’d also tell you that it has something to do with flood symbolism. I don’t mind saying that there have been times when it felt like having our civilization wiped away by a biblically-proportioned flood felt like it might be a good idea. (Right now, for example.) Floods are there to wipe things clean, to create a blank page. Around the time of the 15th anniversary of Kavarna (our former coffeehouse), we were feeling that way about the business. The image of the café being washed away by a flood came in a dream and we commissioned a local artist to illustrate it for the 15th anniversary mug. I’m not sure how people interpreted that image, if they bothered to think about it at all. But for us, it was the beginning of the intention that led us to sell the business five years later. Floods are meant to be cleansing and allow for positive change. Which is ironic, because in reality they are very messy affairs. Anyway, I can’t deny that this symbolic tradition has something to do with the attraction I have for these photographs.

I’d also say that it has something to do with how human beings are in these photos. I like that at certain moments, when danger isn’t imminent, people move just past fatalism, through the surreal, and into something that approaches, dare I say, joy? There seems to be something about cruising around your neighborhood in a row boat, perhaps with your dog on board… Sure, later on you will need to rebuild civilization, and that will be exhausting, expensive, and awful. But for a brief, liminal time, when so many things about the built environment have revealed themselves to be less real than they seemed, people are free from something. Maybe. At least until the flood waters recede. No doubt that coffee tastes twice as good under such circumstances.

And it surely has something to do with the details. The chicken following its appetites in the midst of ruin, the brand new 1956 Oldsmobile driving along the surface of the water, the boy leading his dog across a narrow plank above a surging creek with bystanders hoping he doesn’t fall… Flood photography, as a genre, offers unique opportunities for unusual images.

To date, my collection is only a couple dozen photos strong. My favorites of these (including the images alluded to above) are presented without any further commentary here. I’ll add more as I go.