An alleyway leads off Oxford Street down a flight of stairs into the narrow pedestrianised Ramillies Street. This short, relatively narrow road has been rather grandly named The Soho Photography Quarter. A series of huge billboards have been erected up onto the office walls lining one side of the street and opposite them is a bus-stop-style wooden banquette which you can lean back against and stare up at the photos which have been blown up to enormous size to hang on the billboards.
The layout and what’s displayed here are managed by the nearby Photographers’ Gallery. Currently the billboards are displaying ten or so hugely blown-up photos by documentary photographer Gideon Mendel. Mendel has made a reputation as a reportage-style documenter of the world’s intensifying climate crisis and the installation has the name Fire/Flood, which I’ll explain below.
Two billboards displaying works from Gideon Mendel’s project ‘Burning World’ in The Soho Photography Quarter, just off Oxford Street.
Apartheid
According to his website Mendel was born in Johannesburg in 1959 and began photographing in the 1980s, during the final years of apartheid. This experience as a ‘struggle photographer’, documenting the brutality of the South African state’s response to peaceful protest, ‘marked him’ and much of his subsequent career has focused on responding to the key global issues facing his generation.
AIDS
In the early 1990s Mendel moved to the UK and embarked on a long-term project to document the impact of HIV and AIDS. This photographic odyssey began in London but took him back to Africa, where he worked with organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières, UNICEF, The Global Fund, Treatment Action Campaign, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, Action Aid and the Terrence Higgins Trust.
So: highly politicised, highly socially aware.
Drowning World
Since 2007 Mendel has been working on two projects relating to the gathering climate crisis. The first is ‘Drowning World’. In this he sets out to record the impact of the increasing number of disastrous floods around the world.
Their USP is starkly simple: each photo shows someone from a different location around the world standing up to their middle in floodwater. The photo on the right, below, shows Shirley Armitage from Moorland Village, Somerset, standing in her flooded hallway, in February 2014.
Two billboards displaying works from Gideon Mendel’s environmental series: one from ‘Burning World’ on the left, the other from ‘Drowning World’, on the right – in The Soho Photography Quarter, just off Oxford Street.
All the photos are shot in same formulaic way: colour, pinpoint digital clarity, flood victim standing half submerged in the flood waters (some of the subjects are up to their neck). He has invented a very striking and distinctive form of modern portraiture. Portraiture for a world heading for disaster.
Burning World
More recently Mendel has been working on a parallel project, ‘Burning World’. This is a series of stark images showing the aftermath of the increasing number of disastrous wildfires around the world. Just as the Drowning World images show survivors standing inside or in front of their flooded properties, so Burning World shows people standing inside or in front of their houses after they’ve been burned to the ground in wildfires. The photo above left shows Kevin Goss standing in the ruins of his house in Greenville, California, on October 23 2021.
Information panel
This is the information panel to this small (numerically) but huge (sizewise) and ginormous (thematically) display. The panel explains that the neat images of incinerated cameras are from a related series, ‘Climate Artefacts’ i.e. they are relics of the climate-change-caused wildfires he’s been documenting. He describes the fire-damaged objects as ‘carrying some power, bearing in their scorched and twisted materiality the marks of climate change; artefacts of global warming.’ That a set of fire-ruined cameras is chosen for the information panel is, of course, heavily symbolic.
The Gideon Mendel information panel in The Soho Photography Quarter.
The movie
As part of the installation, every evening a short film Mendel has made of his climate projects is projected onto the wall opposite the billboards. Or you can watch it on YouTube.
What can I say? Extreme weather is becoming more common. The planet is screwed. Every day I wake up and thank God that I live in what Michael Ignatieff calls a zone of safety rather than a zone of danger; that I live in a mild and temperate climate and not one of the places which is going to become an uninhabitable hell (Australia, the Middle East); and that I am free to stroll around this big dirty city and see wonderful artworks. These huge and striking photographs document the lives of people from all round the world who were not so lucky.
Billboard displaying Mendel’s photo of Jenni Bruce standing in the burned-out ruins of her home in Upper Brogo, New South Wales, Australia, on 15 January 2020, part of his ‘Burning World’ series
Related links
- Gideon Mendel: Fire/Flood continues in the Soho Photography Quarter until 30 September 2023
- Gideon Mendel’s website: the Drowning World project
- Gideon Mendel’s website: the Burning World project
Books & Boots 