~ inspiration 05 ~The Places We Live ~ Jonas Bendiksen
Compelling and comprehensive multimedia, well worth exploring at length. We are introduced to 4 slums and then in turn to 4 households who are invited to talk. You won’t regret following the link above. (make sure you look around the homes…)
“In 2005, I started work on The Places We Live, a project about urban poverty and slums. For three years, I visited dozens of families in four slums around the world.
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. Only when I got transcripts of the recordings months later did I see the wide spectrum of stories told. 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.”
thanks to the blog (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography (http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2009/03/dharavi-etcetera.html) whose blog today is especially articulate.
