An award-winning photojournalist from the 1980s on, Gideon Mendel began thinking about documenting climate change in 2007, when he had relatively young children, ages 8 and 5. As he neared 50, he wondered: “What might the world be 50 years ahead, when they were my age? Then, without really knowing what I was doing I started photographing floods.” His goal is to make “visceral” the reality of human-caused climate change in a way that images of disappearing glaciers and threatened polar bear environments could not, he told NPR in a wide-ranging Zoom interview from his base in London.
He began going where the floods were — floods typically linked to climate change. In the U.S.
, for example, scientists know that floods are becoming more frequent and severe because of more extreme precipitation and sea level rise from climate change. But instead of racing to capture ongoing storms and rainfall, he waited for the water to settle and tried to capture the trauma of the aftermath. He would meet and engage with people in the affected communities and, if they agreed, would arrange to photograph them.
Soon, he said, he found himself “developing a style that was increasingly moving away from documentary photojournalism and somewhere into art and activism.” “It’s a real situation but I’m positioning people and constructing the frame very precisely,” he said. “These images make you want to look at them, the first time for the aesthetics, and then a double take for th.