The Places We Live exposes the everyday lives of people living in city slums all over the world. The project follows 16 slums located in: Caracas, Venezuela; Mumbai, India; Nairobi, Kenya; and Jakarta, Indonesia.
The project has been made into a beautiful book of photos, an exhibit at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, and an interactive site that highlights four slums featured in the book. The dwellers in each city are brought to life through intimate portraits+photos of their homes and hoods as well as translated audio interviews on the site.
Bendiksen comments:
"The Places We Live was not a search for finding the absolute extremes of urban poverty—I wasn't looking for the dirties spot, the poorest hovels or the most crime-ridden street corner. My task was to find how people normalize these dire situations. How they build dignity and daily lives in the midst of very challenging living conditions. In the project, I asked someone from each family to "tell me about life around here". Since I do not speak either Spanish, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi or Marathi, I had one rule-of-thumb during the recordings: As long as the subject talked, I didn't interrupt to get translations of what they were saying (...) For me, the process was a sort of protection from projecting too much of my own preconceptions of what slum life involves—and meant the project had to be interactive and collaborative."
This photo project needs to be seen, not read about, so take your gallery view here: theplaceswelive.com
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