[Guardian] Gideon Mendel’s powerful, water-damaged image from 1980s Johannesburg speaks to the deterioration of memory.In 1990, when the photographer Gideon Mendel left his native South Africa for London, he deposited a number of boxes in his friend’s garage in Johannesburg for safekeeping. These boxes contained, among other things, negatives and transparencies from Mendel’s harrowing first few years as a photojournalist during the struggle against apartheid in the mid-80s.
Over the next three decades, Mendel became renowned for his intimate, socially engaged photography, documenting the effects of the HIV/Aids crisis and climate breakdown. For one project, from his Drowning World series, he has gathered nearly 2,000 water-damaged family photographs picked up on his journeys through flooded communities in the US, India and elsewhere.