Water in the Street, Sun in the Sky: Kadir Van Lohuizen's "Sunny Day Flooding, Miami Beach" (2014)

There is something uniquely disorienting about this photograph. The sky is clear. The sun is shining. And the streets of Miami Beach are underwater. Taken in November 2014 by Dutch photojournalist Kadir Van Lohuizen during a king tide event, the image shows workers wading through flood water on a bright, ordinary afternoon, checking whether the drainage system is blocked. No storm is visible. No clouds. The flooding has come not from above, but from below — rising through the drainage system and over the seawall at Indian Creek, pushed upward by the gravitational pull of the moon and the inexorable climb of the sea. It is, in its quiet way, one of the most alarming images ever taken of a major American city.

Van Lohuizen came to this image as part of an expansive, decade-long project documenting the human consequences of sea level rise across nine regions of the world, eventually published as the photobook After Us the Deluge. As a Dutchman, he brought an unusual personal familiarity to the subject. In 1953, a decade before his birth, catastrophic flooding in the Netherlands killed more than 1,800 people and erased nearly a tenth of the country's farmland. Growing up in a country where a third of the land lies below sea level, Van Lohuizen understood from childhood the relationship between civilization and water — how intimate, and how dangerous, it could be. That background gave him a sharper eye than most for what was already beginning to happen in Miami: a wealthy, glamorous, sun-drenched city slowly being reclaimed by the ocean.

Miami Beach sits on a foundation of limestone — porous, honeycombed, shot through with channels that water moves through freely. This geological fact is what makes the city uniquely, almost uniquely, vulnerable: seawalls cannot protect it, because the water doesn't need to come over the wall. It comes through the ground itself. As Van Lohuizen noted in his caption for the photograph, experts had concluded that Miami Beach and its surrounding bay area would likely need to be evacuated by 2060. By the end of the century, models suggest, close to a million residents could be permanently displaced. The city has invested heavily in raising roads, installing pumps, and elevating infrastructure — but the fundamental problem, a rising sea meeting a sinking, porous city, cannot be engineered away indefinitely.

What makes this photograph so valuable as a piece of environmental storytelling is precisely its ordinariness. We have learned, in the decades since the first iconic images of climate catastrophe emerged, to associate climate change with the spectacular: hurricanes, wildfires, floods that swallow entire coastlines. But Van Lohuizen was interested in something subtler and, in many ways, more frightening — the slow, relentless, incremental intrusion of the sea into everyday life. He called it the "much earlier" crisis: long before the ocean permanently floods coastal land, it begins to intrude at high tide, turning fertile soil saline, making drinking water brackish, making ordinary movement through a neighborhood something that requires rubber boots on a sunny afternoon. This is the real texture of sea level rise, and it is already happening.

The photograph is also, quietly, a portrait of denial. Miami Beach in 2014 was still very much in the business of building luxury condominiums on its vulnerable coastline, selling real estate at premium prices, and treating the occasional king-tide flooding as a nuisance rather than a warning. Van Lohuizen photographed the workers not in panic, but going about their job with practiced efficiency — as if this were simply part of the maintenance routine. In a sense, it was. And that normalisation of the extraordinary is perhaps the most chilling thing the image captures. We see water in the streets of a prosperous American city on a clear November day, and somewhere, in the back of our minds, we think: they'll fix it. They always do. Van Lohuizen's life's work is a patient, meticulous argument that this time, they may not.