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Using the exhibition 'Positive Living: Art and AIDS in South Africa' (Peltz Gallery, London, 2016) as a starting point, this article offers itself as a short history of some key visual strategies developed to raise political consciousness in South Africa and internationally over one of the darkest periods in South Africa's history, 1999-2006, when former President Thabo Mbeki, in denial about the relationship between HIV and AIDS, withheld life-saving treatment from hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable South African citizens, who were only just emerging from the scourge of apartheid. The article examines the strategies deployed by fine artists engaged in raising awareness and support from the international community in order to put pressure on the South African government, together with visual strategies sometimes assigned as 'craft' or 'therapy', and produced as local and, often, rural community responses to the HIV crisis. 'Positive Living' is concerned to provoke a more comparative debate about the relative values and limitations of different visual strategies as part of a wider commitment to the ways in which visual and material culture (shortcomings notwithstanding) can produce powerful tools for social change.

\"I am excited to be presenting the first major Canadian exhibition of Drowning World in such a well-traveled public space as the Toronto transit system. I hope [Gideon Mendel]'s powerful collection of photographs and videos truly affects commuters and elicits an emotional response to this very serious shared reality,\" said Sharon Switzer, National Arts Programmer and Curator, PATTISON Onestop. \"We hope the immersive experience offered by PATTISON Onestop's Contacting Toronto: Drowning World initiates conversation and that our partnership with CONTACT emphasizes the vital role played by the arts in the social, economic and educational fabric of our community,\" said Randy Otto, President, PATTISON Outdoor Advertising. \"PATTISON recognizes the importance of private sector investment in culture and is proud to support four unique Scotiabank CONTACT exhibitions this year.\" PATTISON Onestop, a division of PATTISON Outdoor Advertising Canada's largest Out-of-Home advertising company serving 200 markets coast-to-coast, is a world leader in the development and operation of Digital Out-of-Home Media (DOOH) for mass transit, mall, retail, hospitality, residential, office, and outdoor environments. Art in Transit represents PATTISON Onestop's ongoing arts and culture programme.

[Gideon Mendel]'s initial involvement with HIV and AIDS was as a photojournalist commissioned to do a job, but over the years he has become an activist and now works closely with ActionAid (see http://www.actionaid.org). His commitment to the cause is evident, as is Mendel's respect and affection for the subjects of his photographs. As a result, the mood generated by these powerful images is one of optimism as well as sadness. Early on, Mendel realised that, as an educational tool, images alone did not convey enough information, so he added narrative text to each image. In many pictures, the words are those of the subject of the photograph. The personal stories of Joseph Gabriel, Susan Atuhura, and Mzokhona Malevu, of voluntary care workers, nurses, and families facing AIDS provide both a human face to the statistics and insight into the work of those who are dedicated to helping reduce the spread of the virus.

Several portraits of people living with HIV or AIDS from South Africa or Mozambique taken by photojournalist Gideon Mendel are presented. Mendel's unique body of work came out of a goundbreaking project which produced a visual testament to some of the people living on the frontline of one of the most important struggles of our era.

He was also bewildered by the array of misguided benevolent ventures converging on the camp: \"Calais felt at times like a music festival gone wrong.\" During one visit in early May, he watched as a Spanish circus came waltzing through the tents and huts with jugglers and musicians, followed by a Christian procession with a healing donkey and, later, a delegation of sympathisers from Essex -- all taking pictures. \"They were making a donation, and they had to be photographed handing over the cash,\" he says. \"There were all kinds of weird and wonderful and terrible things that came into the camp. I thought, 'What people really need is immigration lawyers.'\" He followed the procession into a church built by Eritrean refugees from sticks and tarpaulin, and had just begun to take some pictures when he was confronted by a refugee who started shouting at him: \"You fucking photographers. You come here and you take our photographs and you tell us that it's going to help us, but nothing changes. The only person that it helps is you.\" It was an acutely worded attack, and [Gideon Mendel] became \"quite revolted with the idea of photographing in the camp. I didn't want to lift a camera any more.\" Anxious to avoid the pictures becoming \"ruin porn\", another photographic cliche (used particularly in relation to the beautiful images of post-industrial Detroit), Mendel was careful to display the objects in as dignified a way as possible. \"There was such chaos in the place, I had this instinct to make things as organised and neat as I could.\" He made several trips to dig around in the sandy wasteland, sifting through layers of rubbish, asking himself, \"How would someone in 1,000 years understand what had happened here?\" This activity was viewed with bemusement by the camp's inhabitants, but without the antagonism that photography provoked.

How do you produce art about climate change? Everyone from writers to painters to film-makers itch to grapple with this question - but often struggle, getting bogged down in the complicated science, or the worthiness of the subject. It's the same for photographers: \"There's a real problem with the image of climate change; it's either evidence - 'the water was up to here, and now it's there' - or it's cute polar bears,\" says Gideon Mendel. Mendel's photographs not only show the dramatic impact the water has had on people's homes and lives, but also seem to highlight the faith of the community. \"What's always interesting about floods is what they show about the society,\" Mendel agrees. \"That Pentecostal thing is huge in Nigeria, and people in their lovely church clothes were having to get through flood water on the way to church.\"

[Gideon Mendel]'s photographs have gone some way towards addressing that. Swapping his vintage Rolleiflex film camera for his iPhone, he fired off shots quickly and posted them to Instagram, where they were reposted and tweeted. \"I hadn't intended to take such good pictures with my phone,\" he says. \"I tend to do my 'serious work' with my film and digital cameras.\" This teenage boy was larking about with friends in the water - yet his expression as he hits the water is almost sombre.

They are quite intimate shots. There's dad on the sofa, presumably watching the telly. There's kid brother leering at the camera as he bites into a slice of pizza. Oh, and there's the pizza, red and lurid on the screen. \"My sister didn't want me to take any photographs of her,\" says another. None of this cramped their style. One boy, the girls tell me admiringly, took 1,002 photographs during his evening with a camera. IN THE FRAME Megan Cavanagh, David Lawrence, Chloe Kirkbride, Kieran Diston, Brogan Turnbull and Taylor McGee with photographer [Gideon Mendel] IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE Photographs by Kieran Dilston, top, and Megan Kavanagh, two of the children f ro m St Aidan's Church of England Primary School, Gateshead, taking part in an ambitious photo documentary project

[Flood] stories such as the one in the Bible and the Qur'an exist in almost every culture. Humans cannot survive without water, and yet they are mortally threatened by it. In the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh (c1700 BC), the gods decide to destroy the earth by flood. Utanapishtim, Noah's forerunner, is told to take a boat, abandon his home, and save animals and seeds. \"Tear down the house and build a boat! Abandon wealth and seek living beings!\" Just as in Noah's ark, animals matter more than possessions. Gideon Mendel's photographs juxtapose images of Britain's floods in June and July this year, when more than a month's rainfall within 24 hours submerged much of Yorkshire, Gloucestershire and the Midlands in turn, with the August monsoon floods that devastated northern India and Bangladesh. Part of the power of these pictures is their intimacy. The subjects stare out at us, seeming to say, \"Look: this is our fate, but it could be yours.\" Biblical Noah, shut up with his cargo of animals, sends out his dove across the waters three times in search of land. The third time it does not return, so he knows it has found somewhere dry to live. Noah is released from fear by letting something go. The ark, by contrast, even though it floats on the waters, is an image of containment. Our response to floods is also an effort at containment, as we close the floodgates and try to hold wild nature at bay. When New Orleans, sited below sea-level, was \"protected\" by levees, when Ugandan planners built on wetlands, when the UK government refused to rule out building on flood plains and offered guidance on \"flood-resistant construction\", they were all attempts to keep water out and down, which cannot work in the longer term.

Gideon Mendel Photos courtesy of Somerset House Skating London's ice rinks welcome skaters of all ages and all abilities to their beautiful settings. This spectacular rink is in front of Somerset House. The British are falling in love with skating and with each other. The romance of a holiday-season skate apparently prompted several marriage proposals last year. Gideon Mendel Photo courtesy of Somerset House Skaters enjoy an evening turn on the ice at London's Somerset House, which was the first to tap into the idea of setting up outdoor rinks during the holiday season. Gideon Mendel Photos courtesy of Somerset House Skating London's ice rinks welcome skaters of all ages and all abilities to their beautiful settings. This spectacular rink is in front of Somerset House. Gideon Mendel Photo courtesy of Somerset House Skaters enjoy an evening turn on the ice at London's Somerset House, which was the first to tap into the idea of setting up outdoor rinks during the holiday season.