When Hurricane Ian swept through southwest Florida in October 2022, it left a trail of destruction in its wake. For Tyler Sharkey’s family, eight feet of floodwater washed away nearly everything—including boxes of family photographs that held decades of memories.
In Distorted Memory, Sharkey recounts his extraordinary effort to rescue over 1,700 waterlogged images, carefully washing, drying, scanning, and digitally restoring them. These were no ordinary photos—they were snapshots of a family’s life, taken by his mother in an era before digital photography, with no negatives or backups to turn to.
Through this journey, Sharkey explores how memories survive when the physical world fails. The storm had blurred edges, erased details, and lifted portions of the photos, leaving only fragments of the moments that mattered most. What remains is both fragile and resilient—small pieces of a family’s history, preserved against all odds.
A story of loss, memory, and the power of preservation, Distorted Memory captures the delicate, enduring beauty of what we choose to hold onto, even when everything else is swept away.
We often think of climate change as a threat to the future, but it’s quietly erasing the past too. Rising seas, wildfires, and heat don’t just destroy land—they destroy history. Cities, landmarks, archives, photographs, even personal memories, vanish or decay, leaving only fragments behind.
Memory and history are fragile. When parts of the past disappear, we instinctively try to fill the gaps, reconstructing, guessing, and reshaping what remains. Loss doesn’t just erase—it transforms.
Remembering is not holding onto the past as it was, but engaging with it, interpreting it, and even reinventing it. Climate change may erase the physical traces, but history lives on in the stories we tell and the pieces we choose to preserve. What we keep, what we let go, and what we recreate defines how the past survives.