tiedame.pages.dev

Gideon mendel: the ward

    •

Gideon Mendel

South African photographer (born 1959)

Gideon Mendel (born 31 August 1959)[1] is a South African photographer, based in London. His work engages with contemporary social issues of global concern. It was his work as a 'struggle photographer' during the final years of apartheid in the 1980s that first brought attention to his work.[2]

Life and work

Born in Johannesburg in 1959, Mendel studied psychology and African history at the University of Cape Town. He began photographing in the 1980s during the final years of apartheid and produced a number of bodies of work documenting the resultant societal conditions and political climate in South Africa.

In the early 1990s he moved to London, from where he has continued to respond to social issues experienced globally. He travels extensively in order to do so, which is reflected by his images focusing on people and societies from countries all over the world. Most of his projects are developed over long periods of time. Video has increasingly become a part if his practice, and he also emp

    •

GIDEON MENDEL, a London-based South African photojournalist, received the 1996 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his work exploring the lives of people with AIDS. An exhibition that will include Mendel’s images will be shown in the gallery of the United Nations, in New York, during the U.N. Special Session on AIDS in mid June:

In 1993, I was part of a group project called “Positive Lives,” organized by my photo agency, Network, in which photographers responded to AIDS in the U.K. My first exposure to the issue was photographing in an AIDS ward in London. I found the situation different than any I’d ever experienced as a photojournalist. It was only 10 percent photography and 90 percent communication and connection with people, dealing with issues of confidentiality, considering how people should be projected, being sensitive not to portray people as victims. That same year, I made contact with a mission hospital in Zimbabwe and I photographed there.

I felt that as an African photographer I needed to find a way to respond to the AIDS cr

    •

Gideon Mendel

Born in Johannesburg in 1959, he studied psychology and African history at the University of Cape Town. Following his studies he became a freelance photographer, photographing change and conflict in South Africa in the lead-up to Nelson Mandela's release from prison. In 1990 he moved to London, from where his focus as a photographer has been on documenting social issues globally and, in particular, in Africa. He first began photographing the topic of AIDS in Africa in 1993 and in the past sixteen years his work on this issue has been widely recognized. His style of photojournalism, whether in black and white or in color, has earned him international acclaim. He has won six World Press Photo Awards, first prize in the American Pictures of the Year competition, a POY Canon Photo Essayist Award, the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography and the Amnesty International Media Award for Photojournalism. He has worked for many of the world's leading magazines, such as National Geographic, Fortune magazine, Condé Naste Traveller, Geo, The Sunday Times Magazine, The

Copyright ©tiedame.pages.dev 2025