My Environment: Gideon Mendel

20 May 2026

The London-based South African artist on his nearly 20-year project documenting the personal impacts of flooding and wildfires

Editor’s note (May 2026): This interview with photographer Gideon Mendel first appeared in the Winter 2025 print edition of The Environment. As the FCERM sector readies itself for Flood & Coast 2026, we are publishing it on our website for the first time.

There are plenty of eye-catching works of art in Thirst: In Search of Freshwater, at London’s Wellcome Collection. But none are as emotive as Gideon Mendel’s “Deluge”. Over 21 riveting minutes, this five-channel installation explores the aftermath of flooding in 11 countries through commentary-free footage of the individuals, homes and communities affected. The work brings together all the different elements of Mendel’s long running Drowning World project, his attempt to show the personal impacts of climate change through portraiture, landscape photography and found objects.

Mendel began his career as a photojournalist in his native South Africa, documenting the fight against Apartheid. He moved to London in 1990 but continued working in Africa, photographing those affected by AIDS. His work has appeared in magazines all over the world and garnered many of the top awards for press photography.

In 2007 Mendel began engaging with the topic of climate change, travelling to Yorkshire and Bihar, India, to document the aftermath of flooding there. He’s since visited flooded places all over the world to continue this work. In 2018 the artist widened his focus to include wildfire, photographing people affected along with the remnants of their homes, as well as scorched landscapes and objects.

Mendel talked to The Environment at his studio in East London in the autumn of 2025.

What was it about the 2007 floods that prompted your shift in practise?

The 2007 floods was the beginning of me finding a kind of language. I had been very much a conventional traditional photojournalist, and I really wanted to do more than just document things. I wanted to make work which could do something. I was trying to imagine the world my kids would be living in at my age and trying to find a way to respond to climate change.

I was looking for a way to tell the story without a huge caption. When I started this work, a lot of the imaging of climate change was either very polar-bear driven or very evidential, and not about people. I wanted to create strong photography which was viscerally about people affected by climate change. I put people in the middle of the frame, looking straight at you. It’s a kind of deep witnessing that I offer the people that I'm photographing, that's what they want.

That year I photographed the floods in Yorkshire and Bihar, in India. I just felt there was some kind of shared vulnerability. I'm often with [people] when they are returning to their homes and trying to make sense of it. Those Yorkshire floods were when I began to make portraits and over the years, the portrait element has almost become the spine of my work.

What drives you to keep adding to this body of work?

It’s about building up a collection of portraits and people. It's very important to me that it’s not only people in Asia and Africa, because that's often the kind of expectation, that people affected by the climate emergency are somewhere else. I want [the subjects of the work] to be very much the kind of place, the kind of person that you know and identify, it's not remote. I want to build it up so you’re seeing a significant number of powerful portraits, and it's showing the different types of people who are affected.

How do you build a relationship with your subjects?

It's an approach – a language and a style – which I've developed over the years. Every situation is different so there isn't one set of rules, but it's always about approaching people with respect and being very clear about what I'm doing. In 99 per cent of the cases, people really are keen to be part of it. The few situations where I've had pushback have been where there’s been lots of media around.

It can be logistically quite tricky. I was just recently working in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the fires. I was there for five weeks, and it was a weird thing, but I've never felt as needed as a photographer. With the flooding work, sometimes there's a complex arrangement to get there. Or sometimes you just find people at their homes.

Do you work with a team on the ground?

I always work with an assistant or fixer, that’s really crucial. Finding someone who's compassionate and intuitive – the nature of that collaborator – makes all the difference. Connecting with people is very much the heart of what I do. It's very important that the people I photograph don't come across as pathetic, sad victims, that they show agency and strength in what they do.

Are you seeking to create a particular impact with your climate work?

Over the years of making the work, it’s been shown a lot in the media, in publications all around the world. It's also been in exhibitions in galleries and museums. It sits fairly comfortably in both those contexts, but the most significant for me is that it has also been used a lot in climate activism. I like to make what I call ‘tools of visual advocacy’, things which can work. I've done a lot of work with organisations like Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion, where my works have been part of protests. There was lot of usage in Europe with the Fridays for Future protests.

How does that way make you feel?

It's a huge privilege as a photographer. There have been times where you felt that your photography was really important documentation, part of some kind of movement. I was working as a photographer in South Africa in the eighties and then I was very involved in the fight for equal access to treatment HIV. There was a moment when the politics around that were very influenced by images, so my images were very much part of that struggle.

Unfortunately, this particular struggle [the climate crisis], I feel we’re totally on the losing side. It’s very hard to have any sense of positivity now. I had an exhibition at one of the UN gatherings pre-COP last year and I got an absolutely clear sense that in that world now, the idea of reducing CO2 emissions in any significant ways has disappeared. It's all about mitigation. Which is just so stupid, because how can you mitigate what's coming our way?

What's the future of this body of work?

I'm not as young as I used to be. I'm still strong and have lots of energy, but I think it would be healthy to draw to some sort of conclusion. I'm in the early stages of conceptualising a book which puts all the material together. Easiest is to make a book of the flood portraits, but I really want to have all the elements together, and also for it to have an activist element, maybe a set of posters which could be part of protests.

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For more artistic practise exploring the climate crisis, see the Time and Tide Bell Organisation’s presentation at Flood & Coast 2026: “Time and Tide Bells – their impact on coastal communities”.

This article originally ran in the Winter 2025 print issue of The Environment magazine. Become a member of CIWEM today to gain access to the quarterly magazine, as well as digital access via MyCIWEM. Non-members can also access the monthly The Environment digital newsletter.

Jo Caird is editor of The Environment