For Spain’s flood survivors, a photo project helps recover memories
VALENCIA, Spain — Months after devastating flash floods carved a muddy scar through Valencia, an effort to save some of what was lost continues apace.
More than 220 people were killed last October when flash floods in eastern Spain brought walls of water that drowned people in their homes, plastered entire towns in mud and debris, and damaged countless buildings.
In the days after, volunteers from the region and all over Spain came to Valencia’s hard-hit suburbs to help. Among them were students from Valencia’s Polytechnic University who sifted through the wreckage for photos belonging to families who had survived the disaster. As they bicycled around town, they put up posters and spread the word about turning in soiled photos to see what could be saved, said Esther Nebot, a professor of cultural preservation at the university and one of the project’s coordinators.
Water-stained and splotched with mud, the photos have an abstract quality to them. Neon pinks, yellows and blues have replaced the faded tones of old photo albums and the browns and sepia tones of negatives. Many are hard to decipher but for the odd caption preserved in marker.
But outlines of faces and memories remain even in the most damaged pictures.
‘Summer, 1983’
“Summer, 1983,” reads one photo caption that shows a trip to a river in eastern Spain. Little else remains of the picture besides swirls of purple. Others are more intact, like the photo of an older woman glancing at an angle toward the camera, a portrait that evokes another era.
The restoration process starts with volunteers registering each photo and taking pictures of them, including to record how they were arranged in an album. Then, each image is cleaned in shallow bins of water. Later, they are hung to dry and mounted on a special paper, before they are returned alongside a digital copy.
Many Valencians who survived the floods, Spain’s worst natural disaster in recent memory, learned about the project by word of mouth. Some say it has helped them not lose their own history.
‘Emotional wealth’
“When you realize how much you’ve lost, you can see that you’ve lost something fundamental, like visual memories,” said Isabel Cordero, a retirement-aged resident who survived the floods but lost all her possessions in a ground-floor apartment in the hard-hit town of Aldaia. She said she will never forget the calls for help that she heard at night or the arrival of volunteers who brought water and milk after the tsunami-like waves swept through her neighborhood.
On a recent January morning, Cordero collected a brown paper bag from the university filled with photos that had been cleaned. She flipped through memories from decades past, when her children were young and when she herself was college-aged.
The project, a tearful Cordero said, gave back an “emotional wealth.”
“It’s something that cannot be reconstructed or recovered in any other way,” she said.
Others are still waiting to see the photos they handed over to the photography students, who have received 230,000 photos and 1,800 albums. The project’s organizers want to get to every photo by the one-year anniversary of the floods, but Nebot said they will not turn anyone away who comes with more albums.
That could mean not finishing by late October, Nebot said, as the time it takes to clean a picture depends on how damaged it is coming in. Many photos stayed soaked for weeks, with their owners salvaging what they could.
Months later, many in Valencia are still picking up the pieces after the floods. Some of them now they carry fragments of their lives before.
