Jonas Bendiksen (b. 8/9/77) is a Norwegian photographer and has been a Member of Magnum Photos since 2008. After an internship in Magnum Photos London Office in 1996, he went to live in the former USSR. While there, he produced the images for Satellites – Photographs from the Fringes of the former Soviet Union, which was published in 2006.
Bendiksen, in an interview with Vice in May 2013, describes the book as “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 unrecognised.”
Satellites
Bendiksen’s Satellites portrays a post-apocalyptic world of ruined cityscapes and shattered lives, caught fleetingly in fragments of a broken mirror, or through a smashed window; snatches of narratives that can only end badly;
There is suffering in the sharp edges and even more explicit suggestions of madness and despair in some portraits.
The outside is typically grey, cold, empty and angular; a kind of deadworld; a permanent winter;
His interiors are often red but without warmth; it is the hot, sweaty red of the strip club or the lonely bar, framed to emphasise the physical and psychological empty space;
There is a hint of filmic, techno-dystopias in his photographs of people salvaging parts of crashed soviet spacecraft and of a child looking skywards (think Mad Max), despite the surreal presence of butterflies and even a hint of the Orwellian presence of Stalin in the screenglow of a bleak domestic interior;
There is more obvious surrealism too that adds to the sense that these are places and people that “don’t really exist”;
There is little humanity in Bendiksen’s photographs. Even where his subjects are at the beach, dancing or relaxing, they are caught without their clothes on or looking faintly ridiculous. Few people smile. Shadows pass each other or facelessly glide by in the gloom;
There is art (as in artifice) in the painterly use of colour (but see Egglestone’s Mississippi for a much kinder use of the colour red), in the technical skill of the ‘accidental’ image and in the carefully arranged casualness of his observation but Bendiksen’s is an unremittingly bleak view. Perhaps the view of a privileged outsider who did not see the forms of resistance that people generate in the face of unrelenting odds or who wished only to capture the struggle.
To go beyond the given was clearly not Bendiksen’s aim (there are no images of the plutocrats in their Dallas style dachas, for example, just occasional hints of the former USSR) but there is a kind of visual colonialism where the natives are made to look strange, ’other’, even savage, in ways that deny them their full humanity. This is a familiar form of contemporary documentary photography and may have its roots in the (northern) eurocentrism of a previous age. It is a gaze that pities, perhaps, but which does not share the soul of those whose lives on which it falls.
It may be easier to imagine these people and places as having no real existence; as satellites on the edge of our world. It may make it easier to take photographs of them without too much discomfort but it is a narrow, disengaged and distant view.
