LIFE AND DEATH FRAMED
Gideon met his future wife at the Middlesex Hospital where she was working on the Aids ward at the time when the Princess of Wales held the
hand of a dying Aids patient, and in one stroke changed attitudes and
melted hearts across the world. Since then he has travelled around Africa
making human the stark reality of Aids.
"I worked with hospitals, non governmental organisations and home
care groups. I didn't just walk into peoples' lives or homes and start
photographing them.
"The concept of personal testimony has become more and more a part
of my work. I spend time with each person with my little computer and
it gives my subjects a voice. It's very hard to tell the whole story of
Aids just with photographs, and personal testimonies add so much more."
Mendel's latest work is a modern take on the Quilts project which remembered
individuals who died from Aids in the 1980s and early 1990s.
"It allows people living with HIV to tell their own stories. Some
are visible, some invisible because of fear or stigma and some just show
their hands not their faces while telling their stories.
"It started in Mozambique," Gideon explains: "Some HIV
positive people were quite nervous about exposing themselves in an exhibition
which would be widely seen by everyone. Some thought their children would
be stigmatised.
"I wanted to do something different so I took a roll of photographer's
gaffer tape and
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made a frame on the wall and I told people to see it as their frame. I then
