On the occasion of World Habitat Day, The National Building Museum in Washington D.C. presents Jonas Bendiksen’s body of work, The Places We Live, on view through January 15, 2010 and published by Aperture last Fall.  For the first time in history, more people live in cities than in rural areas. One-third of those city dwellers—over a billion people—live in slums, mostly in the rapidly urbanising cities of Africa and Asia. Slums have become the fastest growing human habitat in the world. The Obama Administration with UN-HABITAT co-hosts the global celebrations of World Habitat Day in Washington, D.C. on October 5th, an event celebrated on the first Monday in October each year. World Habitat Day this year will focus on the theme of improved urban planning so that our cities can manage and reduce the impacts of climate disruption, the economic crisis and urban poverty around the world.

Visit Aperture’s microsite for The Places We Live to learn more about this important project.

Click here to purchase your copy of The Places We Live through Aperture.

Click here to read the FLYP Media interview with photographer Jonas Bendiksen.

Jonas Bendiksen: The Places We Live
Thursday, September 17, 2009—Friday, January 15, 2010
The National Building Museum
401 F Street, NW
Washington, D.C.

Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen’s series The Places We Live, was recently featured on  The New York Times Lens blog in a piece titled: Must See: A New Kind of News. This project is highlighted as it has been presented as an interactive website based on his series, which was published by Aperture. The site provides a 360-degree view of the urban slums of Kenya, India, Venezuela, and Indonesia as well as interviews with the people who inhabit them. This interactive experience engages the viewer and opens eyes into the stories of those who live in the most unfortunate of conditions.

Check out www.theplaceswelive.com to experience these impoverished urban spaces for yourself.

Click here to purchase your copy of The Places We Live through Aperture.

An exhibition of this work is soon to be on view at The Building Museum, Washington D.C. this fall.

Last Monday November 24th, Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen, and author and editor of the Paris Review, Philip Gourevitch discussed Bendiksen’s work from his latest book The Places We Live (Aperture, 2008). The publication, with an introduction by Gourevitch, documents life in slums in four different cities around the world: Nairobi, Kenya; Mumbai, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Caracas, Venezuela.

During the talk Gourevitch asked Bendiksen several questions, including one about the striking attractiveness and color intensity of the photographs, which could be seen as a sharp contrast to the difficult subject matter at hand. Gourevitch wondered if it was a conscious decision for Bendiksen to reveal the beauty in these precarious dwellings.

Listen to Bendiksen’s response here.

Watch a video of the entire discussion on Aperture Live.

View the interactive website The Places We Live.

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.