An award-winning photojournalist from the 1980s on, Gideon Mendel began thinking about documenting climate change in 2007, when he had relatively young children, ages 8 and 5.
As he neared 50, he wondered: “What might the world be 50 years ahead, when they were my age? Then, without really knowing what I was doing I started photographing floods.”
His goal is to make “visceral” the reality of human-caused climate change in a way that images of disappearing glaciers and threatened polar bear environments could not, he told NPR in a wide-ranging Zoom interview from his base in London.
He began going where the floods were — floods typically linked to climate change. In the U.S., for example, scientists know that floods are becoming more frequent and severe because of more extreme precipitation and sea level rise from climate change.
But instead of racing to capture ongoing storms and rainfall, he waited for the water to settle and tried to capture the trauma of the aftermath.
He would meet and engage with people in the affected communities and, if they agreed, would arrange to photograph them. Soon, he said, he found himself “developing a style that was increasingly moving away from documentary photojournalism and somewhere into art and activism.”
“It’s a real situation but I’m positioning people and constructing the frame very precisely,” he said. “These images make you want to look at them, the first time for the aesthetics, and then a double take for the content.”
His subjects, he said, "appreciate the sense of being witnessed, of being affirmed, of showing the world."
In his series of photographs titled “Submerged Portraits,” he trains his camera on people who have been flooded out of their homes. They stand still amid the high waters and pose in front of their inundated homes. They are solemn as they stare into the camera, beckoning if not demanding that viewers acknowledge what has befallen them.
The ubiquity of the impact of climate change is underlined by the fact that these scenes come from 13 different flood zones, including Haiti (2008), Pakistan (2010), Australia (2011), Thailand (2011), Nigeria (2012), Germany (2013), the Philippines (2013), the United Kingdom (2014), India (2014), Brazil (2015), Bangladesh (2015), the United States (2015 and 2017) and France (2016 and 2018).
As Mendel visited more flood sites, he found himself turning increasingly to videos. (These days, he says, “I’m shooting more video than still photography.”) Then, as he reviewed the footage, a common narrative structure emerged of a journey moving through the floodwater to return home.
Deluge, his video installation, is on view at New York’s Asia Society through August 11 as part of its photography exhibition centering on climate change: Coal + Ice. Four videos stream across screens on each of the room’s four walls, showing flood survivors returning to their damaged homes. A five-screen version, in which he has incorporated additional footage, is also now on view in Sweden.
The heartbreak is visible on the faces of his subjects, but no one speaks.
Whether you focus on only one screen at a time, or turn your head from one image to another, it is as if you, too, are slogging slowly through a once familiar, now waterlogged world of former streets now become canals beneath which cars and bicycles and various debris are buried.
Coal + Ice originated in Beijing in 2011 and has been presented in different venues around the world over the years and is always evolving. According to Orville Schell, Asia Society vice president, what’s different this time, is “we've added in the consequences: droughts, hurricanes, fires, floods, all kinds of environmental apocalypse.”
“He made it human and real, that we are all vulnerable and impacted by climate change, regardless of where we live, in the Global North or in the Global South, or what our income is,” commented Tzeporah Berman, chair and founder of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, after viewing Deluge. “He brought to life not just what's happening in the landscape but showed the despair in people's faces.”
“So long as we continue to depend on fossil fuels we will see a rise in temperatures. These extreme events [will] become more frequent. And the impact will dampen the adaptive capacity of the people, because people will be experiencing recurrent extremes,” says Joyce Kimutai, research associate at the Grantham Institute-Climate Change and the Environment.
Portraying trauma is a longtime mission for Mendel, now 64. His career as a photojournalist has led him to document Apartheid in his native South Africa, the HIV/AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in a London hospital, and now climate change -- as he put it, "climate trauma, political trauma, health trauma. From the beginning of my career, I've chosen to connect with people in deeply traumatic situations, and I've developed a way to articulate their trauma."
That affinity, he continues, “is very deeply linked to my family’s history in the Holocaust -- trauma bouncing down the generations,” from his Jewish forebearers in Nazi Germany and Austria. His grandmother escaped with difficulty from Berlin to South Africa in 1939; her mother, three of her sisters and a brother were all murdered in the Holocaust. His grandfather died in the First World War in 1915, fighting for Germany; his wife, Gideon’s grandmother, was transported to and murdered in Treblinka in 1942. That family history, he has written, “lies at the core” of his work and his political activism.
Viewing Deluge demonstrates how seamlessly his work and his social commitment are intertwined. Even so, he says, “Real activists take risks and go to jail and put themselves on the line. I only put my pictures online.”
Diane Cole writes for many publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. She is the author of the memoir After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges. Her website is DianeJoyceCole.com.
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