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Drowning World: Gideon Mendel’s Portraits of Flood Victims

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Since 2007, Gideon Mendel has been strapping on waders, flagging down boats, and taking his Rolleiflex film camera into floodwaters around the world. His ongoing project features seemingly serene portraits of flood victims in unexpected places. The project is Mendel’s personal response to climate change, taking viewers beyond statistics and into the experiences of people around the world.

The 2014 oods in England “felt surreal,” says Jeff Waters, here with his wife, Tracy, in their garden in Staines-upon-Thames. The water stopped rising just short of their doorsill. GIDEON MENDEL

Inspired by the powerful, almost biblical, symbolism of the flood, Mendel’s signature style is to make still and video portraits of people in their submerged environments. The victims often appear stoic, paralyzed, and numb. Yet, Mendel says, they often tell him they are grateful to have him bear witness.

“I sense an almost shared vulnerability across cultures, across nations, across all these different countries,” he says. “When I look at people’s faces through the ground glass of the Rolleiflex, there’s always something quite vulnerable and fragile there.”

His portraits seem to reflect a deep intimacy despite his having met most of his subjects only moments before.

In 2011 Thailand’s worst oods in 50 years swamped the village near Bangkok where Wilaiporn Hongjantuek lives—but she still went to the store to shop for her family.
Storms that swept the British Isles during the winter of 2013-14 brought record rainfall and widespread ooding to parts of England. In a plains region locally known as Somerset Levels, thousands of acres of agricultural land were underwater for a few months, including Roger Forgan’s farm.
In the Somerset village of Burrowbridge, builder Dave Donaldson and his daughter, Heather, 12, pose in their ooded home. Though the rest of his family evacuated for a time, Dave stayed to try to save the livestock from the watery devastation that he says “looked like something out of a weird disaster movie.”
Joseph and Endurance Edem, with son Godfreedom and daughter Josephine, stand before their gated home in Igbogene, Nigeria. In 2012 Nigeria endured its worst ooding in a half century. “I was scared,” says Josephine, “and thought we were going to die in the water.” At least 360 people did.  
Floodwaters surround a house and school building near Muzaffarpur in the Indian state of Bihar. People described the 2007 oods there as the worst in living memory. The ooding closed schools, affected millions of people, and claimed more than a thousand lives.
Between July 2011 and January 2012, 65 of Thailand’s 77 provinces were declared ood disaster zones. The monsoon-driven floods that deluged his home near Bangkok had “something to do with climate change,” says Sakorn Ponsiri. “It could happen again…We will have to be more prepared.”
To the west, in the village of Moorland, Shirley Armitage wasn’t as lucky: Chest-deep water lled the house that her father built in 1955.
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