Gideon Mendel: Deluge

Using aesthetics that are reminiscent of portrait painting, Gideon Mendel photographs his protagonists in front of their homes. The flooded surroundings stand on equal footing as the people, creating a dialogue between humans and disaster. The photographer uses the reflections created by the conditons as a stylistic device.

In Mendel’s Deluge series, the archetypical force of water serves as a universal metaphor for the threatening burden of climate change. Through his work, Mendel aims to draw attention and empathy. His imagery is documentary, centred around people and almost poetic. The quiet intensity of his pictures is moving; they avoid voyeurism and sensationalism, while making calm and sensitive, but often harrowing visual statements about human vulnerability and global injustice in the face of disasters.

To ensure that his work is stylistically distant from other activist-motivated series, Mendel follows a commitment to aesthetics with a clear formal structure: he places his protagonists in the centre of the images, in the midst of their flooded surroundings. Seated or standing, the figures gaze calmly but defiantly in the direction of the photographer, without facial expressions or gestures. The images convey a paradoxical calm amid the chaos. Mendel’s use of static poses avoids distracting movement in the water. This lends his full-body portraits an almost surreal, dreamlike quality, while at the same time making the catastrophe visible through individual stories.

As he sets the stage for his pictures, Mendel constructs a web of tension between calm and catastrophe, normality and destruction. His aesthetically-controlled compositions, in which tranquillity and symmetry dominate, are embedded in the chaotic reality of the flood. Mendel uses mud, debris and water as supposedly controllable elements – in particular the undisturbed surface of the water, which is a central component of his compositions. The images capture the resulting reflections, which create attractive visual effects.

When considering what is actually going on behind the camera, it becomes clear how much effort Mendel puts into each shot: he too steps into the flood and often wades a number of kilometres through water that is sometimes chest-high. Her prefers this to the possibility of going by boat. As he moves through the water, he also has to be careful of his camera: “Technically it’s not safe to do this kind of photography. Over the years I have destroyed cameras. Water is not the most intelligent place to bring them, but I’ve learnt to deal with it. I don’t take more than one device at a time,” says Mendel, in a rather ironic undertone. Because his protagonists look directly into the camera, an emotional openness emerges. It stands out from many classic disaster images, which focus on distance or drama. Mendel’s consistent picture composition creates global comparability – a person from Africa, Latin America or Europe is given equal focus in order to undermine any colonial or class-based hierarchies. The overall calmness in Mendel’s images encourages viewers to look more closely rather than simply consume them emotionally. 

Gideon Mendel’s series was submitted by Brad Feuerhelm, who is one of this year’s group of international LOBA nominators.