Gideon Mendel - Flooded street and graffiti, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil, May 2024
Flooded street and graffiti, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil, May 2024
This image was taken in Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, which was devastated by flooding in May 2020. I had the bizarre experience of travelling in a boat through a historic town centre turned into a liquid landscape. Reality seemed inverted with surreal reflections appearing where they do not belong. With so many museums, galleries, and historic buildings submerged, local people were struggling to comprehend such monumental damage to their cultural heritage. The scale and intensity of this flood felt like a new chapter in our global climate emergency. Since 2007, I have made twenty-three trips to film and photograph floods in thirteen different countries. Working within this topography of climate change I am drawn to making images of precise symmetry and in doing so, I seek to challenge our sense of security in the world. By crafting visually intense and compelling images, my intention is to invite viewers first to engage, then to look further and deeper.
This image, shot in Brazil in 2024 is part of my ongoing Drowning World project and is from a series I call Floodlines. In a flooded landscape, reality can seem inverted, and normality suspended. Surreal reflections appear in unlikely situations. This series records the invasive presence of water by following the Floodline it creates as it moves through personal and public spaces. Within this liquid landscape I find myself drawn to making images with precise symmetry, using the repeated line to bisect the photographic frame. Through creating this tense paradox of visual calm within the chaos of our climate crisis, my intent is to challenge our sense of stability in the world.
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.
He began his career as a traditional documentary photographer but driven by the imperatives of the issues he confronts his work has consistently evolved. 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.
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.
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.
Flooded street and graffiti, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil, May 2024
This image was taken in Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, which was devastated by flooding in May 2020. I had the bizarre experience of travelling in a boat through a historic town centre turned into a liquid landscape. Reality seemed inverted with surreal reflections appearing where they do not belong. With so many museums, galleries, and historic buildings submerged, local people were struggling to comprehend such monumental damage to their cultural heritage. The scale and intensity of this flood felt like a new chapter in our global climate emergency. Since 2007, I have made twenty-three trips to film and photograph floods in thirteen different countries. Working within this topography of climate change I am drawn to making images of precise symmetry and in doing so, I seek to challenge our sense of security in the world. By crafting visually intense and compelling images, my intention is to invite viewers first to engage, then to look further and deeper.
This image, shot in Brazil in 2024 is part of my ongoing Drowning World project and is from a series I call Floodlines. In a flooded landscape, reality can seem inverted, and normality suspended. Surreal reflections appear in unlikely situations. This series records the invasive presence of water by following the Floodline it creates as it moves through personal and public spaces. Within this liquid landscape I find myself drawn to making images with precise symmetry, using the repeated line to bisect the photographic frame. Through creating this tense paradox of visual calm within the chaos of our climate crisis, my intent is to challenge our sense of stability in the world.
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.
He began his career as a traditional documentary photographer but driven by the imperatives of the issues he confronts his work has consistently evolved. 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.
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.
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.