The Places We Live
September 2009 National Building Museum Online
In late summer 2005, Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen moved into a small room in the middle of Kibera, Nairobi, to try to understand daily life in one of Africa's largest slums. He was immediately struck by the residents' remarkable capacity to create normalcy and dignity out of extremely challenging living conditions.
His stay in Nairobi sparked a three-year project further documenting households and families in Caracas, Venezuela; Mumbai, India; and Jakarta, Indonesia. Bendiksen discovered that it was impossible to generalize the lives and experiences of one-sixth of the world's population and that—beyond the common perceptions of poverty, misery, destitution, insecurity, and danger—there were more stories that needed to be expressed. In The Places We Live, Bendiksen captures the enterprise and hard-work, hope and humor, and love and compassion that occur even in some of the world's most difficult environments.
"The neighborhoods pictured in the exhibition are some of the densest and poorest places on earth. My goal was to capture the vast range of ways their inhabitants experience their surroundings—from the destitute to the ambitious and surprising," said Bendiksen.
The Places We Live compels viewers to consider what it means to live in a city in the 21st century. In a multimedia installation, visitors are admitted into the homes of 20 different families in four slums from around the world: Kibera in Nairobi; Dharavi in Mumbai; several barrios within Caracas; and the kampongs of Jakarta. The families' diverse experiences only begin to illuminate the staggering and complex issues that surround human settlement, housing, and poverty.
The Places We Live was produced by Magnum Photos and the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, Norway, and is supported by Canon. All photographs © Jonas
Bendiksen, Magnum Photos. The presentation of the exhibition at the National Building Museum is made possible by Cities Alliance, USAID, and The World Bank.
In 2008, for the first time in human history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas. One-third of these urban dwellers—more than one billion people—resided in slums. That number is expected to rise substantially: the United Nations forecasts that the number of slum dwellers will double to two billion people within the next 25 years. Poverty is urbanizing at breakneck speed, and there are few overarching plans to address how cities can accommodate this rapid influx of humans.
The Places We Live was produced in 2008 by Magnum Photos and the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway and supported by Canon. Cities Alliance, USAID, and The World Bank have partnered with the National Building Museum to educate the American public about this enormous part of our built environment that is unsustainable for humankind. In addition to the exhibition, the partners are planning public outreach and education activities intended to further examine international urban development.
The National Building Museum will open this special exhibition in mid-September in conjunction with International World Habitat Day celebrations, an annual program organized by the United Nations Center for Human Settlements—commonly known as UN-HABITAT. The official World Habitat Day Ceremony and the UN-HABITAT Scroll of Honor will take place at the National Building Museum on Monday, October 5, 2009.
The Places We Live opens September 17 and runs through November 15, 2009.
