Gideon Mendel is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading contemporary photographers. 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 groundbreaking work on this issue has been widely recognized. 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.
His first monograph, A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa, was published in 2001. He has worked for many of the world’s leading magazines—among them National Geographic, Fortune Magazine, Condé Naste Traveller, Geo, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Guardian Weekend Magazine, L’Express and Stern Magazine.
In his current working practice he has been involved with a variety of new advocacy projects often involving a mix of photography and video. He has started a new body of work on the impact of climate change on the world’s poorest people and has also begun a new engagement with the practice of collaborative photography. 3EyesOn is a new project dedicated to finding innovative ways of working with young children, often from poor communities in the UK, to photograph their own lives in profound ways.