Separatist Dreams by Jonas Bendiksen

Separatist Dreams 

Daily Life, second prize stories

2004

Farmers collect usable scrap from the remains of a Soyuz spacecraft in the Kazakhstan-Russian borderlands. Rocket booster stages come crashing down in the area from Baikonur, Russia's main spaceport, nearby. The fall of the Soviet Union officially gave rise to 15 new countries, but political and ethnic disparities as well as arbitrary border delineation have lead to a group of unrecognized states. Some of these ghost republics have physical borders, others are the products of separatist dreams - but they remain cut off from the rest of the world, deprived of the certainties of the old Soviet order.

Commissioned by: Magnum Photos for Geo / Vanity Fair

Photo Credit: Jonas Bendiksen

Born in 1977 in Norway, Jonas was 10, he got a one-year internship at Magnum Photos’ London office. He made coffee and tea, ran to the post office, answered this phones and returned prints and slides to their right place in the archive. A year spend working in the presence of that iconic archive was the best education he could have asked for. After he finished his internship there, Jonas left for Russia to try and become a photographer himself.

He fell madly in love with the former USSR and ended up spending years there. The time he spent there, resulted in his first book, “Satellites – Photographs from the Fingers of the former Soviet Union”, which came out in 2006. Somehow he has always been fascinated by enclaves and people living in isolated communities. While “Satellites” looked at separatist republic in the former USSR, in 2005 Jonas started another project about a different type of enclave – The Urban Slum.

“The Places We Live” became a three-year journey through four slum communities around the world, and in 2008 it became a book and exhibition featuring projections and voice recordings in a three-dimensional installation. He enjoyed working with a diverse group of clients, of all sizes and shapes. Some of his clients have been GEO Magazine, Newsweek, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Rockefeller Foundation, Goldman Sachs, and many others. Since 2004, Jonas have had the pleasure of working with National Geographic Magazine and many other stories. He joined Magnum Photos in 2004.

Today he lives near Oslo, Norway with his wife and son.