Biography
Gideon Mendel is a world-renowned photographer, artist and activist. His forty years of socially engaged photographic practice amount to a profound act of witnessing. His partisan projects are made with the intention to be of use, to both record the world we live in, and also to change it.
With compassion and visual ingenuity he has captured the human experience behind some of the most significant issues facing his generation; from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa to the tragedy and hope of HIV/AIDS through to our global climate emergency.
For the last sixteen years, capturing the human experience and physical impacts of the global climate emergency has been his focus, with his Drowning World and Burning World projects weaving complex narrative threads to depict it. Showing catastrophic floods and the aftermath of wildfires Mendel takes us into the lives of the affected individuals as they navigate the devastation in their wake, and comprehend a profoundly altered landscape.
He began his career as a traditional documentary photographer, but driven by the imperatives of the subjects he confronts his work has consistently evolved. The transition from black and white to colour, along with the incorporation of conceptual and collaborative elements were all informed by his consistent endeavor to make images that work as visual activism. He has never been content to stay wedded to one photographic genre; throughout his career he has been pushing at the limits of photographic practice, challenging himself and his audience to breach boundaries and expectations.
In Mendel’s later work, his engagement with climate issues, portraiture has become his central narrative device. Engaging with his subjects in flooded or burnt landscapes they are not disempowered victims in the photographic encounter. His camera records their dignity and resilience, despite the personal catastrophe that they face. Their direct and sometimes unsettling gaze is a challenge to the viewer, questioning our communal culpability for their plight.
His climate change portraits are complimented by works that mine the surrounding details: the flood lines, the floating detritus and the scorched objects that are dislodged from their origin stories – damaged, warped and melted, then isolated and reconstituted, again through Mendel’s photographic attention.
In recent years he has increasingly taken on the role of an archivist, building collections of objects, from refugee detritus and flood-damaged snapshots through to objects marked by fire. These are forensically photographed as if they are significant archaeological items. He has also innovatively reengaged with his own archive of negatives and prints from his early years as a ‘struggle photographer’ South Africa. Mirroring his practice as a whole, the material objects of his photographic journey are constantly reconsidered and transformed. Taking this approach into his personal life Mendel has initiated a new engagement with a family archive, reflecting on and responding to his parent’s experience as Jews in Nazi Germany and subsequent escape to South Africa.
Since 2010, video has been a growing component of Mendel’s work and he has produced numerous single and multi channel installations where he has built complex narratives that take his visual practice in new directions.
Amongst many awards Mendel has received the inaugural Jackson Pollock Prize for Creativity, the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, the Greenpeace Photo Award, the Amnesty International Media Award, and six World Press Awards. He has also been shortlisted for the Prix Pictet in 2015 and 2019.
His photographs have been utilised in climate protests in collaboration with organisations such as Extinction Rebellion, Fridays For The Future and Greenpeace. His projects are frequently exhibited in galleries, museums and photo festivals. In a new departure his images have been displayed in a variety of unconventional outdoor settings; from the Greenpeace stage at the 2023 Glastonbury Festival, to large-scale banners in the Soho Photographers Quarter outside The Photographers Gallery and submersion in the tides of the North Sea for the First Light Festival.
Since his first book, A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa, was published in 2001, Mendel has gone on to publish three monographs: Dzhangal (2017), The Ward (2017) and Freedom or Death (2019). He is currently working on producing a fifth book, one that combines his work on Fire and Flood.
