LIFE AND DEATH FRAMED
came back in a few days and photographed whatever they put in the frame. I said 'You can show your face, you can show anything. All I want
to know is why'.
"It was quite a painful process for some but a proud one for others
coming out as HIV positive for the first time and being widely visible.
"My photographs themselves are not the point. It's the testament
which is probably more important than the actual pictures. My work is
primarily a tooI for advocacy, raising consciousness and influencing opinion
both in Africa and the west.
"At the Borders Bookshop launch of A Broken Landscape, a Zimbabwean
woman said that since the 11 September disasters in New York she felt
that Africa has come
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to America because the African experience of daily deaths and funerals
was now being brought home to the west."
In 2002, Mendel's work will again be exhibited at the South African National
Gallery in Cape Town before showing at this summer's International Aids
Conference in Barcelona.
Perhaps the key to Mendel's work is that he is included in the lives of
those he photographs and the stories they tell. He manages to hit home
where standard news
The
Treatment Action Campaign march
at the International Aids Conference
2000, from the book
photography doesn't. He portrays the reality of life and death from Aids
