I'm having an extremely frustrating problem that I'm hoping someone out there can help me with.

I have an iPhone that is no longer booting, apple logo appears for 8 seconds, reboot ad infinitum. Oddly, when plugged in to the wall charger, the phone does power on to emergency mode (iccid: unknown and imei: unknown) which leads me to believe that the radio is completely dead.
The problem is that we recently came back from holiday and I have literally thousands of pictures on there, we did not sync before this problem happened (yes, I know...) and I need a way to recover the pictures (I know that some are still intact, emergency dialler when plugged into the wall shows the background picture!)
I followed the instructions by msftguy to create a dmg with ssh embedded and tried to load it using tetheredboot, however although everything is sent to the device, it then proceeds back into the boot-loop.

I am literally completely stumped so if anyone has any ideas on what I can attempt next I would be very appreciative. (Sorry for the long post, I'd rather give you too much information than not enough)

Additional information: The cause of these issues was that the phone went through the washing machine. I have removed the battery as it was dead, I am wondering if maybe that is the issue (iPhone does battery check when connecting through USB, but is direct powered when plugged into the wall?) but I have no idea.

Many thanks for taking the time to read this, I hope you can help!