Power of Photography
Mendel has been on a lifelong quest to bring attention to global issues with his powerful and captivating images
Gideon Mendel was born in South Africa and began his photographic career in 1984 documenting the struggle against Apartheid.
This inspired his lifelong quest to combine creativity with social issues.
In 2001 he published his first book, A Broken Landscape: HIV and AIDS in Africa. Over the years his work has evolved, switching from black & white to colour and from traditional documentary style to environmental portraiture.
Now based in London, for the past 16 years his focus has been on capturing the human experience and physical impacts of climate change, with his Drowning World and Burning World projects. It is for this work that he is given our Power of Photography award. 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 their profoundly altered landscape. His portraits are complemented by works that mine the surrounding details, the floating detritus and the scorched objects that are dislodged from their origin stories, damaged, warped and melted.
IN ASSOCIATION WITH Panosonic
Writing in The Guardian about his work in Rhodes for the Burning World project, he said: ‘Moving through a seemingly endless topography of blackened hillsides and destroyed buildings, I could only bear witness to this humanmade catastrophe. I ho
