After New York City experienced record rainfall this summer, my basement flooded. Water destroyed boxes of books and manuscripts, sitting several inches deep in a plastic crate full of photographs. I spent days trying to rescue as many as I could, peeling old prints apart and laying them out to dry. It was strange and sad, sifting through these fragments of my pre-digital life. I had taken the earliest when I was eight or nine, using a 1950s Brownie box camera that belonged to my mother when she was a girl. For some reason I refused to take pictures…