Restoring Sandy-Damaged Photos, for Free

The other day, when I was helping to clear out a storage space in a flood-damaged Brooklyn home, a lot of items that must have once had some sentimental value passed through my hands. One by one, the sodden relics went into heavy-duty black plastic trash bags: the plush rabbit, the pudgy doll with lopsided eyes, the fleecy baby bunting. This stuff had been in there since the 1950s, according to the house’s current owner, when her grandfather was still around. She wanted none of it. So we trashed it all.

Until that is, we came to a pile of photographs, some in frames behind glass, that had survived the rising waters in surprisingly good shape. Who was the man with marcelled hair in the dapper suit? Who was the smiling woman in the hand-tinted sepia print? We didn’t know, but it felt wrong to put those faces in the bags. We gave them to the owner and she took them upstairs, maybe thinking there was still some meaning to be salvaged there, as her home was being turned inside out and left by the curb.