Jonas Bendiksen

Jonas Bendiksen is a Norwegian photographer represented by Magnum Photos. His work has been published in National Geographic, GEO, Newsweek, and numerous other publications. “Satellites”, his first book, is the culmination of seven years work in the former Soviet Union.

"I love working on stories that get left behind in the race for the daily headlines - journalistic orphans. Often, the most worthwhile and convincing images tend to lurk within the hidden, oblique stories that fly just below the radar." 

In 2005, I started work on The Places We Live, a project about urban poverty and slums. For three years, I visited dozens of families in four slums around the world.

The Places We Live was not a search for finding the absolute extremes of urban poverty—I wasn't looking for the dirties spot, the poorest hovels or the most crime-ridden street corner. My task was to find how people normalize these dire situations. How they build dignity and daily lives in the midst of very challenging living conditions.

In the project, I asked someone from each family to "tell me about life around here". Since I do not speak either Spanish, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi or Marathi, I had one rule-of-thumb during the recordings: As long as the subject talked, I didn't interrupt to get translations of what they were saying. Only when I got transcripts of the recordings months later did I see the wide spectrum of stories told. For me, the process was a sort of protection from projecting too much of my own preconceptions of what slum life involves—and meant the project had to be interactive and collaborative.

Earlier this summer, The Places We Livebook was published, and an exhibition installation launched in Oslo.

Jonas Bendiksen joined Magnum Photos as a Nominee in 2004 and became a full member in 2008.