In Freedom or Death, Gideon Mendel returns to photographs he made during the final years of apartheid, when he documented the township uprisings and the scenes of mobilization, conflict, and tragedy that accompanied them. The images had been left in a box of negatives and transparencies in a friend’s garage in Johannesburg, where the box was rained upon and the top layers damaged. This act of happenstance led Mendel to revisit and re-engage with his archive and gradually create this book.

The book reproduces photographs from that period that are battered by time, damage to the film itself, and deliberate intervention. White ‘struggle’ photographers such as Mendel were based in the suburbs but became messengers in a war that would shape the country. The changes to these physical objects speak of the fragility of memory itself: material traces of the past can be altered just as the human mind is altered by the current of time.

GOST Books published Freedom or Death in 2019: 176 pages in a clothbound hardback with foil debossing. The publisher describes the book as emerging from Mendel’s return to his archive after the accidental damage, placing those protest and mourning images alongside the marks left on the material by time, film flaws, and intervention.