Image: Coke Wisdom O’Neal
We’ve seen the cosmic visual effects that come along with developing a roll of 35mm film after its gone unused for years, but what happens when you leave a superstorm the likes of last year’s Hurricane Sandy to have its way with the artifacts of your purist medium?
This, apparently. Now I wish I could say “Hurricane Sandy developed this guy’s film” or some such punched-up header, but as whimsically dreamy as these images are, that likely isn’t the case. Their seemingly random development patterns could have been the result of floodwaters oxidizing the prints, true. But that’d be a stretch—the chances of water alone developing “any silver-based film, especially color film, and especially especially slide color film,” Reddit user brie-otch writes, are pretty slim. More likely the photos were already developed, leaving Sandy’s waters to warp the photos into gauzy, water-colored vestiges of their former selves.
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Whatever it is, New York City is about to get real blizzard-y. If I actually had any 35mm film on me, that shit would already be laid bare on my back porch.