Thirty years ago, photographer Gideon Mendel left a box of negatives and transparencies in storage in a friend's garage in Johannesburg. At some point the box was rained upon and the top layers damaged. The affected photographs were from Mendel's documentation of the final years of apartheid, when he had witnessed the nationwide township uprising and scenes of mobilisation, conflict and tragedy. This act of happenstance led to Mendel revisiting and re-engaging with his archives, and the gradual creation of Freedom or Death. The book is divided into three sections, each with a different intervention to the original images from Mendel's time as a 'struggle' photographer in South Africa. The first section, 'Damage', presents the accidental, colourful and painterly transformation of the negatives and transparencies by mould and moisture; the work reflects on memory, history and the material life of the photographic archive, as the literal decay of the images becomes a metaphor for the passing of time and the fragility of historical record. It is at once a document of the anti-apartheid struggle and a meditation on how that history is remembered, damaged and preserved.