Gideon Mendel, Ahmed, Khairpur Nathan Shah, Sindh, Pakistan, September 2010. — Gideon Mendel, *Ahmed, Khairpur Nathan Shah, Sindh, Pakistan,* September 2010.

This interview was featured in Issue No. 16 - Chaos

ANDREA: In the Drowning World, you’re not present when the flood occurs correct?

GIDEON: Yes. I kind of get there in the aftermath. Certain kinds of floods work better than others. When I have the resources and the funds to travel, I’m on the phone trying to do research to figure out how long the flood water is going to last. Am I going to be too late? Because I want to get there when the water is still relatively high. I have to find out if the water is still there or if it will last. I’m trying very hard to get all this information before I travel. With the types of floods that happen in America, the water tends to move away rather quickly. I went to a flood in South Carolina last year which was devastating to Columbia but by the time I got there, the water had pretty much left and it was just the aftermath. But the water was moving so I was able to find flood communities further down the river. Sometimes it’s that kind of pacing of things. Floods in India usually last for a long time. Like in Nigeria, I was able to make my trip there in time and still find communities under water. It’s really a matter of research and time and sometimes I make huge trips across the world and end up getting there too late.

ANDREA: Given that you photograph the floods in different places, are people more receptive to you in some locations than others? Let’s say like Americans versus Indians.

GIDEON: There’s not much of a difference between the lesser developed countries and more developed countries, the only thing being that in developed countries people are sometimes more suspicious. I tell people what I do and frequently they whip out their phones and they Google my project to decide if they want anything to do with it. When I’m part of a whole gathering of media, people don’t really respond well. They proceed to react to all the media being vultures.

Gideon Mendel, Chinta and Samundri Davi, Salempur Village near Muzaffarpur, Bihar, India, August 2007. — Gideon Mendel, *Chinta and Samundri Davi, Salempur Village near Muzaffarpur, Bihar, India,* August 2007.

ANDREA: When you go to a place where it is flooded, how do you choose your people? How do you approach your people or find them if you don’t know anyone there?

GIDEON: Completely random and a matter of circumstance. You find people, you speak to them and see if they are willing to be photographed. In some situations, I’ve found people outside of the area and we travel back to their home on a boat and other times there’s quite complicated research. In Nigeria, there was this camp for people outside of the town where the flooding was and I met people there and they took me back to their homes. When I was in Brazil, a lot of people went back to their homes after the flooding had gone down and they used the flood water to clean the mud and dirt off their homes. So a lot of people were in their homes and I could approach them there. I think people are generally, for the most part, open to doing this. When there’s water in your home there’s not much you can do, but as soon as the water is gone, there’s so much you have to be doing and don’t have a moment to spare. While the water is there, it’s kind of a suspended moment and it’s a space that I look into. People keep asking why I go back to these flooded areas, and for me there’s something about a flooded city or a flooded community that I find very compelling, something about the lights, the reflection, and the color, and a sense of things being reversed. There’s water where there’s not meant to be water, and it’s a very weird place. There’s a lot of solidarity amongst the people and they often tend to be very open.

ANDREA: I was very excited to see the process you go through regarding photo montaging, scanning, and etc. There are no limits when you’re working that way.

GIDEON: Yes. In fact, I’m in the middle right now for the first time — I haven’t really told anyone about it — but I’m in the middle of making some kind of physical non-photographic objects. I had an experience recently working in the Jungle Camp, do you know what that is?

ANDREA: No.

GIDEON: It’s a camp in Calais in France. It’s occupied by 6,000-9,000 migrants from all over the world who are trying to illegally cross to the UK. In many ways I feel a particular response to the migrant crisis in Europe and photography has failed on many levels. But, I was part of an attempt at a collaborative project working with migrants and wanting to photograph their own lives, and for a whole set of reasons that project was pretty unsuccessful. In a moment of desperation, I felt a need to make anti-photographic material and began collecting a variety of objects from toothbrushes to shotgun cases to hygienic objects. I’m working at the moment to create some photographic still lives, but I’m also making some physical installations from them. That’s quite a big change for me but there’s a continuity in the work between that and the Water Mark series for Drowning World. With that project, I was becoming some sort of visual contemporary archeologist by rescuing images that had been damaged in the water. I integrated those images for the meaning they had in the flooded societies. The continuity between that work and the jungle, I felt like I’m almost working as an archeologist but removing objects that say a lot about what’s going on in a very charged and political place, prior to thousands of years of sediments working on top of them.

ANDREA: You have one portrait of this couple going down this narrow street that’s flooded and it looks like they’re carrying their belongings. I was wondering if you had more images like that and what objects people generally take with them?

GIDEON: Generally, I’m not there when people are fleeing and taking things away. I’m in the aftermath but it is something I think about. What do you save when you need to flee your house? There’s your family, there’s your cats...for me I would take my cats. Is it a personal thing, like would you take your laptop? I would take my cats and my laptop and my hard drives. But it’s dependent on the person. People often go back to their homes trying to find documents, like their insurance. It depends on the amount of time you have to flee and leave.

ANDREA: This issue is about chaos; would you say your life is chaotic or this project is the most chaotic one that you’ve ever had?

GIDEON: Chaos is a good issue for me because I do naturally lean towards chaos in terms of my organization and my mind, thank god you can’t see my office behind me, but my work is often very structured. Both the images I create and the narrative structures I put my work into are very structured. I think in my Drowning World project I’m operating in chaotic situations but I think I’m trying to create formal structured images. For example, I’ve been editing some of my images from the Flood Lines series which are the most symmetrically structured images.

Gideon Mendel, João Gonzaga de Sousa, Taquari District, Rio Branco, Brazil, March 2015. — Gideon Mendel, *João Gonzaga de Sousa, Taquari District, Rio Branco, Brazil,* March 2015.

ANDREA: Putting yourself in these chaotic situations, have you had any disasters yourself?

GIDEON: In 2008, I went to photograph a massive flood, it happened about a year before the earthquake. In a span of like 3 weeks, Haiti was hit by four hurricanes and the town of Gonaïves was terribly flooded. I got into the town of Gonaïves, the town was covered in a thick layer of mud. The first thing that happened is that it began to rain really hard, and I had one of the Rolleiflex cameras around my neck and the strap, which was unfortunately made out of leather got very wet and it broke, so my camera fell into the water. I had my second camera with me and an hour later we were in someone’s home and I had the camera on a tripod, and the guy who was assisting me, he was quite large and he knocked over the tripod. I had these two water-soaked Rolleiflex cameras and I tried to dry them. They seemed to be working, so I continued photographing for the next few days and those cameras gradually got stiffer and they began to rust. Eventually, they just jammed up on me. When I went back and processed my film, much of it was completely messed up. At first, I was upset that most of my film was completely ruined but then I had this realization there was something fascinating about the flood having a direct impact on the film and it elicited a visceral response from myself. There is one really important and great picture that came out of that and for me when I was in Australia the year after, I began to find damaged photographs and that’s how Drowning World began.

ANDREA: That’s a good story.