Accomplished Photographer Randy Taylor Lost Four Decades of Work to Superstorm Sandy

But he also gained a new set of interesting images.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Superstorm Sandy is still fresh in the minds of the thousands of people it affected some 14 months ago. Families lost everything and were forced to rebuild, many while being denied assistance from their state government. The storm affected photographer Randy Taylor in a very different but still devastating way.

Taylor kept some 30,000 images in file cabinets in a storage unit in an area hit hard by the storm. The contamination caused by flooding meant that he was not allowed access to his unit for weeks. When he was finally allowed in, Taylor found that nearly all of his life's work, financial records, equipment, and personal belongings had been destroyed by water and mold. According to Slate, at times in his career, Taylor was being published around 100 times a month. His website lists previous jobs for Cambridge University, Nissan, Citibank, Microsoft, Continental Airlines, Nikon, Ernst & Young, Toshiba, and many others, but none of them were more important to him than the old photos that his family had given to him as the "de facto genealogical archivist of the family history."

The small percentage of photos that Randy Taylor was able to salvage are currently being sold as prints. In a strange twist of fate, the water damage caused the colors and chemicals in the images to create cool and interesting patterns, new works of art born out of destruction. Check out more of the Sandy-assisted works over at Slate.

[via Huffington Post]

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