Newspaper Article

G2: Drowned worlds: This summer, torrential rains deluged India and Britain. Millions of people in the poverty-stricken state of Bihar, and thousands across England, were driven from their homes. Photographer Gideon Mendel recorded both floods in a series of images that reveal striking contrasts between the disasters - but also unexpected resonances. Maggie Gee introduces a 10-page special

Gee, Maggie

2007

Overview

[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.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Mendel, Gideon