“Tell me about life here,” Jonas Bendiksen asked each family that he visited in the slums of Caracas, Nairobi, Mumbai and Jakarta. Then, he recorded their voices and photographed them and their homes.
“It was important for me not to be the only narrator,” he says. “The rule of thumb was, as long as they were talking, it didn’t matter what they were talking about.”
Bendiksen is an award-winning photographer from Magnum Photos, whose images have appeared in National Geographic, Newsweek and the Sunday Times Magazine, among other publications. In his latest work, The Places We Live—a book as well as an exhibition that is currently on display in Oslo, Norway—he sets out to question our stereotypes about slum dwellers.
The narratives from the residents themselves are littered with “this place is great” or “to me its beautiful.” There is a certain pride among these homeowners, who frequently follow up these praises with stories of hardship and strife.
The Western viewer sees something different; Bendiksen’s images are so vivid and alive, capturing people rushing in and out of the frame as they move through their transitory environments. His 360 degree photographs of those in some of the most densely populated slums around the world not only capture the places and the people, but their lives.
Take a tour through three homes with Bendiksen’s intimate 360 photographs in our interactive page. Also, hear Bendiksen’s own responses to his work and the experience of going into his subjects’ homes.
Visiting the Slums
Bendiksen spent roughly three months in each city, which let him develop an intimacy with his subjects. The result is images that leave nothing outside of the frame, eliminating the mysteries of poverty by placing the viewer directly in the center of his subjects’ lives.
At the Oslo exhibition, he has displayed his photographs around the walls of each room, so viewers can walk into the homes just as he himself did. His goal is to immerse the visitor into the worlds that he visited.
Indeed, Bendiksen’s whole project aims to give us a view into the reality of the lives of the billion or so people who live in urban slums around the planet: “They are poor and they have hardships, but let’s think of them as individuals, just like we think of ourselves.” His photographs show how they make their poverty work, fashioning complexly personal environments with anything found around them.
Bendiksen never passes judgment on his subjects. He documents them not as a burgeoning urban form nor as a problematic community in need of help, but rather just as evidence of the way that “we” live. And “we” is the operative word.
As Philip Gourevitch, editor of the Paris Review, concludes in the introduction to The Places We Live, “it is the rarest of gifts that can make a page come so alive—and it is rare still that in doing so, these photographs make us think, and by thinking know ourselves a little better.”