South Africa-born photographer Gideon Mendel has photographed flood zones around the world for the past 10 years, but photographing recent hurricanes Harvey and Irma was entirely different, he says.
Speaking to HuffPost SA ahead of his forthcoming exhibition at Wits University Museum (WAM), Mendel said he realised that extreme wealth can be as vulnerable as extreme poverty.
"I photographed some very wealthy people in their houses during the latest floods, with their possessions wallowing in water. It was different for me because it began to take the narrative away from it always being black or brown people being the subject of natural disasters." Mendel says.
"People were devastated. Wealthy, and poor."
His enormously successful series of images called "Drowning World" has been featured in major publications such as "National Geographic", exhibited in museums around the world and even used on placards during climate change protests.
"I have this strange, unusually mad impulse that draws me back to flood zones. Obviously, flooding causes huge destruction and ruins people's lives, but as an artist there is something that is extremely compelling there as well," he says.
"The world is turned upside down, there's chaos everywhere, something beautiful happens with light... But whenever there is a flood there is a strong impulse drawing me back there. There is just something so visceral about it, and it says a lot about our shared vulnerability as people."
Mendel emerged as a photographer for "The Star" newspaper during the apartheid years and found his passion for flood zones working on an assignment covering HIV cases on the continent.
"For many years, I was working on HIV and Aids around Africa, and the 'Drowning World' project came out of a period when I had my own young children and I started imagining the world they would live in when they were my age, but also found that there were so many problems with the imaging of climate change," he says.
"At that point, there were just so many images of polar bears and glaciers, and they didn't feature very much about the people. So I wanted to make something much more confrontational."