When nature bursts into your home
Photographer Gideon Mendel’s imagination was captured by an English deluge. The flood sparked a mission around the world to document how a natural phenomenon changes lives, writes Robyn Sassen
SOUTH Africa-born photographer Gideon Mendel says he has become a “global flood vulture”. Documenting floods for his Drowning World project has won him the inaugural Pollock Prize for Creativity. The prize, named after US painter Jackson Pollock, is awarded by the New York-based PollockKrasner Foundation, which said the photographs were “breathtaking”.
London-based Mendel said his “obsession” began in 2007 when there was a flood in England.
“I was experimenting with making portraits with a new Rolleiflex camera. Six weeks later there was a flood in India and the die was cast. I was deeply struck by the contrasting impacts of these two floods and the shared vulnerability that united their victims. Since then I endeavoured to visit flood zones around the world.”
Having won several photographic awards over the years, Mendel said this award, which comes with a purse of $50 000 (about R765 000), was “nice to have, as it is across the arts. It’s interesting for me as my work is sitting on the borderlines of documentary art and activism.”
After studying psychology and African history at the University of Cape Town, Mendel came of age as a self-taught photographer in South Africa in the ’ 80s “in an unusually intense moral environment of antiapartheid”.
“It was a privilege to work with such a clear sense of right and wrong and I think that sort of marked me.”
Mendel left South Africa in 1990. Documenting how HIV/Aids touched the lives of people became an important focus for him and his first monograph, Broken Lives, was published in 2001.
Over the nine years that he has engaged with this Drowning World project, he has travelled across Britain, to Haiti, Pakistan, Australia, Thailand, Nigeria, Germany, the Philippines, Kashmir in India, Brazil, Bangladesh and the US.
“Each country deepens the narrative impact of the project, making the similarities in responses across cultures and time more evident,” he said. Drowning World is intended to bear witness to “shared human experience that erases geographical and cultural divides”.
“In a flooded landscape, life is suddenly turned upside down. Normality is suspended and human beings must adapt, strategise, move forward,” Mendel said.
There are four parts to his work: conventional landscapes of waterlogged cities, roughly traditional portraits of flood victims who stand in water, documentation of the waterline and water-damaged photographs found in the floods.
“My subjects often invite me back to their homes,” he said of the portraits. “To get there we travel together through deep flood waters. When I take the photo, the subjects take up a conventional pose, in spite of their environment being grotesquely abnormal. In these dystopian circumstances, I try to make the moment when I press the shutter calm and connected.”
Besides the story of Noah’s ark, every major religious system around the world had flood myths, said Mendel. The floods go on, but Mendel needs to take a decision to give his project closure and publish the images in a book.
For now he is classifying his submerged portraits by water level, from the deepest to the shallowest.