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Jonas Bendiksen: Well, I think what makes Magnum interesting and still relevant is that you have this incredibly diverse range of photographers, who in their own ways create photography that’s a commentary on what they see around them. And I think Magnum has become even more interesting in recent years because it’s become more diverse.

Magnum has a common goal: to use photography to be part of a conversation about the world around us. Within that, each photographer might be interested in different things, but that goal is the common denominator.
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Yeah, the book is a journey through the fringes of the former Soviet Union. I stopped in all these places that you could say, on paper, don’t really exist. I mean there are these breakaway republics such as Transnistria and Abkhazia, that exist physically—they have their own borders and governments—but which are unrecognized. You could say these places represent some of the unfinished business of the Soviet breakup. So, that became a journey for me.

You could say these were all people living under quite a bit of pressure, in the sense that life in these places is economically hard. To this day they are somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. It’s hard to travel from there and it's hard to make a living while there. At the same time, these places are all quite different, and have their own unique character. Places We Live was your next book after Satellites. It dealt with the idea that for the first time ever, more people live in cities than outside of them. Did you treat it as an environmental issue or a social one?
I think my point is that both notions are completely inseparable. It's one of the things that working on that project made me think about. I mean, I’m not trying to say whether living in cities is a bad or good thing. What I'm saying is that it’s a phenomenon and we have to deal with it. More than 1 billion people live in slums and that number is forever increasing. We need to accept that these are how modern cities function and engage with the problem.
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I think that’s what surprised me throughout the entire project, and also why I made the project. I had read all these statistics and felt it was an issue that needed to be explored. But what really made me want to expand the scope of it was that I was overwhelmed by the normalcy of these places. You see the huge amounts of garbage and among them, you see normal people living pretty normal lives, dealing with the same issues as people everywhere else. They’re helping their kids do homework, trying to make a living, keeping their families together. You know, that project was an exploration of how people create normalcy in these kind of extreme settings.

You could say it’s not the type of thing that has really worked in my life. I became a father at the age of 24. So through much of my career I have been a father, and it’s just never made any sense to me to be the guy who flies off to where they’re dropping bombs. And I think that there are so many interesting issues to look at around the world. There are so many other forces and pressures working on human beings around the world that create so many fascinating and complex situations. There is certainly room for someone who is not going to conflict zones to do interesting work. So, it’s never really been on my agenda. I’m not quite sure why, but I’ve always taken the most satisfaction when I do stories where I feel somewhat left alone, stories that everyone’s not chasing after. Which has led me to working on projects that are a little bit outside of the big headlines; smaller stories. Maybe they aren’t as dramatic and sexy as some of these other things, but to me that’s always been the most satisfying way to work. I feel like I’m bringing something to the table by engaging in a story that might not have gotten so much play otherwise.
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