Gideon Mendel is a London-based photographer born in Johannesburg in 1959. He began photographing in the 1980s during the final years of apartheid. His first book, A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa was published in 2001. Since then he has produced a number of photographic advocacy projects, working with charities and campaigning organizations. His work has been published in many leading magazines including National Geographic, Fortune Magazine, The Guardian Weekend Magazine, The Condé Nast Traveler, and Rolling Stone. Since 2007, Mendel has been occupied with “Drowning World,” an art and advocacy project about flooding that is his personal response to climate change.

In 2007, after photographing two floods in the UK and India, Gideon Mendel, “was struck by the contrasting impacts of these floods, and the shared vulnerability that seems to unite the people.” Since then, he has traveled to flood zones around the world to witness this global catastrophe through photography and video. Deluge opens with landscapes devoid of humans and slowly begins to reveal the catastrophic consequences as people enter the frame rowing and trudging through rising tides of endless sludge. Through these intimate portrayals of individuals and families across ten countries, Mendel shows the shared global experiences of climate disaster.