With a series of portraits of people in their flooded or burnt-out homes, Gideon Mendel is a "deep witness" to loss. He tells Fiona Macdonald how he captures images that show our shared vulnerability.
Joy Christian, Dorca Executive Apartments Otuoke, Ogbia Municipality Bayelsa State, Nigeria, November 2022, from the series Drowning World Rhonda Rossbach, Derek Briem and Autumn Briem, Killiney Beach, British Columbia, Canada, 16 October 2021, from the series Burning World Mendel is keen to show his subjects on the same level as the viewer."What's very important to me in the portraiture is that people don't come across as victims – that they have agency, that they are showing us what's happened to them but not as victims.""I was photographing in Nigeria in 2012," says Mendel."Florence Abraham showed me her business and home. She was a baker, and she had a whole bakery – she said she employed 24 people.
Camera technology has also evolved since Mendel began his project."For the first years of working in flooding, I was working in an analogue way, I was on old Rolleiflex cameras, which was both beautiful and crazy, working in the most difficult circumstances you can imagine with these old cameras which would jam – after many failures in that area, I did eventually move across to working with digital cameras.