The Places We Live

The year 2008 has witnessed a major shift in the way people across the world live: for the first time in human history more people live in cities than in rural areas. This triumph of the urban, however, does not entirely represent progress as the number of people living in urban slums often in abject conditions will soon exceed one billion. From 2005 to 2007 Jonas Bendiksen documented life in the slums of four different cities: Nairobi, Kenya Mumbai, India Jakarta, Indonesia and Caracas, Venezuela.His lyrical images capture the diversity of personal histories and outlooks found in these dense neighborhoods that, despite commonly held assumptions, are not simply places of poverty and misery.