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Jonas Bendiksen |
At
15 years old and living in Norway, taking pictures becomes important
to young Jonas Bendiksen. He builds a darkroom in his parents' home
and begins to develop not only his photos, but also a point of view
about the kind of photos he takes then and wishes to take in the
future. He has no doubt that he wants to spend his life as a
photographer.
His mother is American. His father is Norwegian. From the time he is
small, one of many topics around the dinner table is the Soviet Union
and the members of his mother's family who live in what was then
Leningrad – now St. Petersburg -- under the thumb of oppressive
Communist rule. Some of the talk centers on getting the family out of
the Soviet Union to safety. In the near future, this will be important
to him in unexpected ways.
When 18 he goes to Bristol, England, to a school, where he takes a
yearlong course in photography. He learns about the nature and the
business of photojournalism. Importantly, in 1996 when at 19 he
completes the course, he gains a coveted internship with Magnum Photos
in London. This is where he can learn even more and where he can hone
his skills. Because of his budding ability, he is promoted to an
associate at Magnum in 2006, a rare step for someone so young.
In 1998, only 21, Jonas Bendiksen travels to what is no longer the
Soviet Union. It is now Russia, or what people call the FSU – the
former Soviet Union -- the country his family talked about so
frequently at his home in Norway. As a photojournalist, he starts to
do what he believes is his mission. Over the next two years, he would
take pictures, in his words, "outside the main story of the day." He
wants to document people and their actions, actions and people that
are different from what we see in the daily newspapers, magazines and,
today, online.
He saw his role as a documentary photographer early in his
development. He wanted to operate in the realm of ideas, rather than
that of hard news where other photojournalists take a different
approach to what they see through the lens of their cameras. Living in
Russia for two years and concentrating on isolated communities off the
beaten path, he was able to fulfill his early dream. He worked in what
he called "the enclaves that were springing up in the cracks of the
FSU." That meant he spent time in places that no longer existed the
way they once were and where people were struggling for an identity.
Thus his first book, "Satellites," the result of seven years' effort,
which describes the work he does. He says he did not set out to
publish the project as a book, but the book found him, a natural
progression.
Over the years, his photos have appeared many places, including
National Geographic magazine, GEO, Newsweek and The Paris Review. He
says that 90 percent of what he does are projects he generates
himself. Since 2005 he has been working on a undertaking he calls "The
Places We Live." Jonas Bendiksen says it is "about the growth of urban
slums across the world. In 2007, the world's urban population for the
first time will overtake the world's rural population. At almost
exactly the same time, the number of people living in urban slums is
topping one billion." His project explores what that means to the
people living in four different cities across the planet.
From the project "The Places We Live" © Jonas
Bendiksen/Magnum Photos
The proposed book of photos and Bendiksen's model of the installation,
which I saw, will I believe have a powerful effect on the people who
experience both. The concept is simple, yet complex because when done,
hopefully, we will never look with contempt or pity at how people live
in a slum called Dharavi in Mumbai and how people live in the Kibera
slum in Nairobi. He will show us how people exist in the hilltop
barrios that surround Caracas, and how they survive in the slums that
are along railway tracks, drainage canals and under bridges spread out
across Jakarta. Bendiksen's aim with his book and the installation is
to show us the lives of the people he photographed, lives that are
full of surprises.
The installation will have interconnecting rooms that will allow the
visitor to travel from one site to another and 16 projectors to
enhance the viewing experience. It will open at the Nobel Peace Center
in Oslo in the summer of 2008. Aperture will simultaneously release a
book by the same name. When its stay in Oslo ends, the installation
will go on the road.
In the end, not yet 30, after only 10 years in the business, Jonas
Bendiksen has a fully developed philosophy of photography. In his
words, "I love working on stories that get left behind in the race for
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."
And he seems to have done just that.
View Jonas Bendiksen's Photo Gallery
At NBC News for 35 years, Ron Steinman was bureau chief
in Saigon, Hong Kong and London, was a senior producer on Today and wrote
and produced for Sunday Today. At ABC News Productions, he produced
and wrote documentaries for A&E, TLC, Discovery, Lifetime and the
History Channel. He has a Peabody, a National Headliner award, a
National Press Club award, a International Documentary Festival Gold
Camera Award, two American Women in Radio & Television awards and
has been nominated for five Emmy's. He is a partner in
Douglas/Steinman Productions, whose latest documentary, "Luboml: My
Heart Remembers," aired on PBS' WLIW/21 and the History Channel in
Israel, April 29, 2003. He is the author of, "The Soldiers 'Story",
"Women in Vietnam," and most recently, "Inside Television's First
War: A Saigon Journal," University of Missouri Press, 2002. |
