Jonas Bendiksen’s The Places We Live opens at the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo
This year, for the first time ever, more people on Earth live in cities than in rural areas. A billion of these urban dwellers are living in slum conditions, often in makeshift homes, without access to basic infrastructure. How does a photographer tackle such enormously complex subject matter? For his ambitious new project, Jonas Bendiksen decided to hone in on twenty stories, five families in four different slum neighborhoods, in Kibera, (Nairobi); Dharavi, (Mumbai); Jarkata; and Caracas.
Bendiksen’s resulting project, The Places We Live, opened last week at Oslo’s Nobel Peace Center. This multimedia exhibition, comprised of rear-projections, allows viewers to enter the homes and environments that Bendiksen photographed. Audio of his subjects telling their stories, in their own voices, is piped in from above, adding further context. The result was immersive and effective, driving home the point that this is how a billion people live today and that each has his/her own story to tell, of everyday life, and events both big and small.
You can purchase the newly available book here.
September 17th, 2008 at 12:41 am
[...] insightful and forward-looking project from him. And the book itself (not to mention the Exhibition at the Nobel Center in Oslo, which consists of ‘rooms’ with back-lit projectors) is incredibly innovative with [...]