Kashmir, India, 2014
‘I arrived in Kashmir two weeks after the rivers had burst their
banks and found Mushaq Ahmad Wani and Shafeeqa Mushtaq
living on the second floor of their house with their two young
children; the ground floor had been completely submerged and
was still inhabitable. Mushaq worked as an artist, and had saved
much of his collection by storing paintings upstairs, but many
houses in this area were on the brink of collapse, held together by
mud mortar alone. Everyone seemed to be in shock and there was
a lot of anger, too. They hadn’t been warned early enough by the
authorities and Shafeeqa was keen to show the world what they
were going through; for others to bear witness to the destruction.’
FACING TH
Photographer Gideon Mendel has spent 12 years capturing the extreme rise in flooding