Jonas Bendiksen captures the normalcy of poverty, the everydayness of life close to the subsistence minimum. And even if this everydayness is not ordinary at all for Western eyes, it does not seem at all strange or revolting in his photographs. They do not show pitiful slum residents; there is none of the clichéd mixture of fascination and repulsion common to many photographs and documentary reports of this subject matter. His work also does not swing to the other extreme of romanticized representations of poverty.

Jonas Bendiksen always takes photographs in the same way: families sit or stand in front of the four walls of their own home, which the photographer photographs individually. The four images are then projected onto the walls of a two square meter room in the exhibition space, such that a 360° view of the living space in the original layout results. In addition to the panorama photos, the life stories of the individual residents are told—providing a direct encounter with spatially and socially excluded people and their homes. The exhibition contains one space for each of the four cities and the photos within them alternate every few minutes. The photos are not projected forward in the traditional way, but backward through separate screens. The projectors thus remain invisible, heightening the realistic effect—and creating the impression that the viewer is standing in the middle of the room being shown.

C/O Berlin has installed four modules in the main hall of the Postfuhramt (Royal Post Office) especially for Bendiksen’s projections. The impressive space-in-space installation on display at C/O Berlin is the first and only exhibition of this work in Germany. In 2008, photographs from this project appeared in a book published by Knesebeck Verlag. On the occasion of UN-Habitat’s World Habitat Day, Bendiksen’s exhibition was shown at the National Building Museum in Washington in October 2009.