People Beyond Poverty: Jonas Bendiksen

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PHOTOGRAPHER JONAS BENDIKSEN says that you can't speak in generalities about the four urban slums he's lived in and documented since 2005.

But there is one striking generality you find in his immersive new show about slum life, "The Places We Live," at the National Building Museum: From Nairobi to Mumbai to Jakarta, corrugated sheet metal is a building material of first resort among slum dwellers. In Bendiksen's landscapes, metal roofs heave and jam together to the horizon, cresting like waves of a dull, rusted ocean.

People who live in slums are resourceful — the filth around them would seem unfathomable if someone were not out there fathoming it, beneath pirated power lines, in search of wire or plastic to turn into currency.

Bendiksen's slums come to life in domestic portraits projecting and dissolving at full scale onto four walls of a gallery enclosure, where you also hear the stories his subjects tell him in voice-over. You can almost smell the heavy blankets or the newsprint of the China Daily helping to close out the rest of the world.

By the United Nations' count, more people now live in the world's cities than not. Slums are the fastest-growing neighborhoods, and their medieval informality began to obsess Bendiksen not merely for the misery he found within them but the resilience, too.

» National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW; through Nov. 15, free; 202-272-2448. (Judiciary Square)

Written by Express contributor Bradford McKee
Photo by Jonas Bendiksen