Documentary photographer Peter Caton has been on the road for the past 17 years photographing the climate crisis. Peter Dench talks to him about his project documenting floods in South Sudan
Around 17 years ago, documentary photographer Peter Caton made a life commitment to reporting on humanitarian causes and amplifying the voices of disadvantaged people. For the last ten he has focused on Africa’s climate-related crisis. The decision to live out of a suitcase means he has sacrificed marriage, having children and building a community of friends to bring him up when he’s feeling isolated and low. On a rare visit home to see his parents in his home town of Scarborough on the UK’s North Sea coast, Caton was at an impasse where to go next? ‘I’m not a God-fearing man or anything but I went to church before Covid, I never do but my dad was going. He hadn’t been for 25 years, my mum goes every week. I decided I’d pop along as well. At church I prayed and said to God, where would you like me to serve you? Where shall I go next because I have this crazy nomadic life. The prayer finished and then it was hymn time and I opened up this book and there was this tiny flag and I was like Woah! What is that about? I didn’t even recognise the flag. I turned it over and it said South Sudan,’ reveals Caton.
For the past three years, homes and schools across South Sudan have been destroyed by devastating floods. Particularly hard hit were the remote towns of Old Fangak and Paguir, cut off as the rising water, debris and dense vegetation left them hard to reach. According to a UN report, 426,000 people have been affected. The number is expected to increase by more than 50%. In areas like Fangak the number of people affected by the floods is expected to jump from 75% to 100%. The country as a whole has surpassed the mark of 8 million people in dire need. Less than a year after his prayer, working with Action Against Hunger USA (AAH) and accompanied by resilient writer Susan Martinez, Caton arrived in the remote Fangak County in Jonglei state in South Sudan. ‘It was far away from anywhere. A small five-seater aeroplane is the only thing that can touch down there on a kind of cow field that’s been previously inundated with water so it’s really uneven – you have to scare any cows away so you do a swoop and come back up and try your best to land. It’s a bit hairy. As soon as I walked into the first classroom where there were, say, 30 families living in absolute squalor with chickens and dogs, at that moment I thought wow, if that was a message from God this is it, this is the reason,’ he says.
If getting there was difficult, photographing in deep flood water was equally challenging. Caton didn’t shy away, in fact he made it harder. ‘For the last decade I’ve been us
