The Great Front Range Flood of 2013 as Art?

Foam and Two Trees. Boulder Creek, Colorado, 2013

The flood has caused a lot of hardships for many people. There has been loss of life. It has been a shock and tragedy for many and it will take time to recover. We were lucky–we only had to move a vehicle from an underground garage that was getting pretty leaky. Others, unfortunately, were not so lucky.

The statistics are amazing, with something like 12 inches of rain smashing down on us during these last three days. That would translate to twelve feet of snow if it had been cold enough. (The skiers would have loved that!) Twelve inches of rain is maybe half of what we get the entire year–in a good, wet year, that is.

Boulder Creek hit a maximum flow of about 5,300 cubic feet per second (!) when normally, this time of year, it is at 200 cfs and you can easily wade across with your three-year-old in hand. (So, consider…The pictures in this post were taken when the flow was somewhere around 3,000 to 3,500 cfs–well below the max of the past week.)

Most photographers, me included, have been out there with the idea of documentation foremost in our digitized craniums. As in something like this:

Boulder Creek at Central Park (documentary image). Boulder Creek, Colorado, 2013

Today, though, I went out with the idea of trying to make images that were a bit different than that…could there be beauty in such a thing as a devastating flood if I were to change my way of seeing things? Or an odd story? Of course. (See the first image above as an example.) But we often don’t look at it that way when our neighbors have lost their home, or they have no functioning sewer system in their town, or they have been evacuated.

With today’s photographs, though, I have tried to find the beauty–or at least something curious–in what I saw.