Gideon Mendel is a world-renowned photographer, artist and activist. His 40 years of socially engaged photographic practice amount to a profound act of witnessing. His partisan projects are made with the intention to be of use, to both record the world we live in, and also to change it.
He began his career as a traditional documentary photographer, but driven by the imperatives of the issues he confronts his work has consistently evolved.
He has never been content to stay wedded to one photographic genre. Throughout his career he has been pushing at the limits of photographic practice, challenging himself and his audience to breach boundaries and expectations.
With compassion and visual ingenuity, he has captured the human experience behind some of the most significant issues facing his generation; from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa to the tragedy and hope of HIV/AIDS through to climate change.
For the last 19 years with his Drowning World and Burning World projects he has been developing a deeply personal yet methodical approach to documenting our global climate crisis, illustrating how its impacts transcend boundaries of wealth, class, ethnicity and geography.
Amongst many awards, Mendel has received the Jackson Pollock Prize for Creativity, the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, the Greenpeace Photo Award, the Amnesty International Media Award and six World Press awards. He has been shortlisted twice for the Prix Pictet (2015 and 2019) and the Oscar Barnack Award (2017 and 2025).
