Matthew Miller

mrmiller@lsj.com

Rae Jordan and her husband, Jarrod, woke at three o’clock in the morning to the sound of their swimming pool caving in.

Their house in Andrews, South Carolina sat on a hill, but the flood waters had reached it.

It was October 7, a Wednesday. Hurricane Joaquin had poured down a 1,000-year rainfall on their part of the eastern seaboard. By 6 a.m., a neighbor was banging on their door saying it was time to get serious. Rae Jordan ran to her 8-year-old son’s room first.

“I started grabbing pictures off the shelves,” she said, “anything that you can’t really replace once it’s gone.”

In the photograph Gideon Mendel shot of Rae and Jarrod Jordan perhaps four days later, they are standing in the dark water that had filled their house almost to the doorknobs. Their faces are impassive.

But as the South African photographer worked, Rae Jordan said, what filled her head was the thought that her husband had bought the house when he was just 17 and memories of the work they’d done to make it a home “and just the realization of knowing that it was never going to be the same.”

The photograph of the Jordans is part of “Gideon Mendel: Drowning World,” an exhibit of photographs and video that opens Saturday at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.

For nearly nine years, Mendel has traveled the globe, shooting near-formal portraits of victims of extreme flooding.

Mendel’s work straddles the lines between activism, art and photojournalism. He began his career in the 1980s as a news photographer, covering the resistance to Apartheid in South Africa. In the early 1990s, he began documenting the impact of HIV/AIDS, first in sub-Saharan Africa and later around the globe.

“Drowning World” is about climate change, the increasing frequency of extreme weather events and a shared vulnerability in the face of them.

“When I began in 2007, most images of climate change were often very beautiful, often very white expanses of glaciers and polar bears and looked to be very far from people’s realities,” Mendel said, speaking by phone from New York. “My ambition was to make a work which made climate change very immediate.”

And so he shoots his subjects - in Nigeria, Haiti Brazil, Bangladesh, Britain and elsewhere - in their half-submerged homes or other waterlogged landscapes vital to their livelihood. They pose, directing their gazes toward the camera.

“Very often, when we see flood images, we see these dramatic aerial shots and debris, the physical reality of that,” said Caitlin Doherty, curator and deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Broad.

By focusing on individuals standing in the wrecked spaces of their lives, Mendel’s portraits “become particularly traumatic,” she said.

Mendel still shoots with a Rolleiflex film camera.

“I like boxes with lenses,” he said.

Shooting in Haiti in 2008, the camera got waterlogged. He didn’t have time to dry it out. The film, he said, “was pretty messed up.”

But the effect got him thinking - “The flood water had a direct impact on the film without the mediation of my photographs and my imagery,” he said –and somewhat later, he started collecting drenched photographs from flood sites, images soaked into a sort of abstraction. Some were given to him. Some he just plucked out of the water.

Those images - both the originals and scans blown up to massive size – will be on display for the first time at Broad. Mendel calls the series “Watermarks.”

“It feels like a kind of contemporary archaeology,” he said, excavation without the layers of sediment and the intervening centuries.

“I’m skipping over those 1,000 years in the middle and kind of claiming objects at this point.”

In the end, the Jordans lost their house. The trash and sewage carried in by the flood waters and the mold that followed when they finally receded pushed it beyond repair. They bought land further inland.

“The biggest lesson we learned is that things can be replaced, but family is forever,” Rae Jordan said.

In a way, she thinks of herself as lucky.

“People in different areas of the world, they didn’t have the time that we did,” she said. “It was a very slow water. There’s times and different places that you don’t have time to get out.”

Contact Matthew Miller at 377-1046 or at mrmmiller@lsj.com.

Drowning World: The Elements

Artist Gideon Mendel will discuss the development of his "Drowning World" project at 7 p.m. on Saturday in the Alan and Rebecca Ross Education Wing

of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, 547 East Circle Drive on Michigan State University's campus. Admission is free.

The exhibit "Gideon Mendel: Drowning World" will run at the museum through Oct. 16. For information, go to broadmuseum.msu.edu.