Villagers collecting scrap from a crashed spacecraft, Altai Territory

Jonas Bendiksen

Jonas Bendiksen is a photojournalist whose domain is the realm of human interest stories rather than hard news. His photo essays focus on isolated communities and people in difficult circumstances, operating outside the notice of mainstream media. He once spent two years living in rural Russia, photographing people who were struggling to discern their identity in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. In 2007, as the global urban population overtook the rural population for the first time, he embarked on “The Places We Live”, a project focusing on the precarious growth of slums across the world. It resulted in compositionally intriguing, emotionally wrenching documentation of some of the world’s millions of slum dwellers. “Often, the most worthwhile and convincing images tend to lurk within the hidden, oblique stories that fly just below the radar,” Bendiksen says.