Customer Reviews

Jonas Bendiksen: The Places We Live

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this book after having seen the exhibit, The places we live, at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo last summer. The exhibit was so moving that I decided to buy this book in hopes that it would remind me about how others in the world live. This book does a good job of bringing the exhibit to your home. The pictures and peoples' excerpts are stirring. Though the photographer, Jonas Bendiksen, has photographed to bring the world to the people in the name of art, be ready to be moved by what and how he's chosen to photograph.

The Places We Live is a fascinating and rewarding photo collection. The format is intriguing; each residence is given a four-page spread so the reader can fully capture the environment. I felt the photos contained an incredible honesty at capturing the pride and the pain of these homes. The vignettes between photos only add to the value of the experience. Wonderful stuff.

Powerful storytelling! Each story and fold out panoramic picture invites you into a world you can hardly believe exists, and one that is impossible to forget.

Each shanty is unfolded in panoptic four-page form (each page a wall of the room); the magic of the layout is in the incongruous edges of the sub-images, which collectively force the reader to interpolate and extrapolate the space between an artificially objective environment. The effect is furthered by the many dead-pan poses of the inhabitants, no doubt dressed their best, whose proud prose accompanies the visuals and forces the reader to think long and hard about the kind of empathy he should award.