Jonas Bendiksen
# Jonas Bendiksen

Jonas Bendiksen (born 1977) is a Norwegian photojournalist based near Oslo. He has published the books Satellites (2006) and The Places We Live (2008) and received awards from World Press Photo, International Center of Photography, National Magazine Awards and Pictures of the Year International. Bendiksen is a member of Magnum Photos and has served as its president.

## Life and work

Bendiksen was born in Tønsberg, in Vestfold county, southern Norway in 1977.

He lived in Russia for several years. The time he spent there resulted in his book, Satellites - Photographs from the Fringes of the former Soviet Union, about separatist republics in the former USSR, published in 2006.

For three years he photographed slum communities in Nairobi in Kenya, Mumbai in India, Jakarta in Indonesia, and Caracas in Venezuela, for The Places We Live, a book published in 2008, and an exhibition containing projections and voice recordings.

Bendiksen became a Magnum Photos nominee in 2004 and a member in 2008. In 2010 he was its president.

The Last Testament (2017) follows seven men around the world who claim to be the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

In 2021, in The Book of Veles, Bendiksen departed from the photojournalism practice by creating a conceptual work about "fake news" which consisted of images that were "faked" using CGI to place humans and bears in scenes that Bendiksen had photographed devoid of life, mixed with excerpts from The Book of Veles (a forged ancient text), and AI-generated texts. The deception, initially not disclosed, escaped detection from his colleagues at Magnum and then curators and audiences at the Visa Pour l'Image festival, until Bendiksen revealed it on the Magnum Photos website. It questioned the ability of the most visually literate people in the photography industry to tell real photos from faked ones

## Personal life

As of 2022, Bendiksen lives with his wife and three children near Oslo.

