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Within the next few years, for the first time in history, more
people will live in cities than in rural areas, and one of every
three of them—about a billion of the planet’s urbanites—will
live in slums like Kibera, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.
Kibera, which is the size of New York’s Central Park, is home to as many as one
million people, some say more, half of them under the age of fifteen and nearly
all of them living in one-story, one-room mud-and-wattle homes. Kibera is one
of Africa’s biggest slums, and it is growing steadily. In fact, the United Nations
predicts that in the coming decades such megaslums will become our primary
form of urban living. To picture what these statistics and projections mean, the
photographer Jonas Bendiksen rented a room in Kibera in the spring of 2005,
and as he got to know his neighbors, they invited him and his camera into
their homes and into their stories. “Look,” he said, when he came back with
his photos and reconstructed those homes—all four walls and the worlds they
contain—on the printed page. “This is the way we live now.”
Click here to view a selection of Jonas Bendiksen's Kibera photographs.
Winner of the 2007 National Magazine Award for Photojournalism
From the award citation: “In ‘Kibera,’ Jonas Bendiksen's documentary of life in a Nairobi slum, the photographer does more than deliver a sequence of striking images; he comes close to capturing the entire city in all of its decrepitude and humanity. Bendiksen's evocative, painterly pictures—exquisitely framed, shrouded in shadow and dim deep color—move from broad landscapes to more discreet intimate moments. Together, they tell a complex story that simply stuns.”
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