Published by Aperture in 2008, Jonas Bendiksen’s The Places We Live examines domestic life in densely populated, low-income districts of Nairobi, Mumbai, Caracas, and Jakarta. Made between 2005 and 2007, the photographs appeared at a consequential moment: the world’s urban population was overtaking its rural population, while the number of people living in informal settlements was approaching one billion. Bendiksen addresses that transition through the scale of individual rooms, households, and personal histories.

The work resists treating these neighborhoods as a single, undifferentiated condition. Poverty and inadequate infrastructure remain plainly present—residents contend with limited sanitation, electricity, and health care—but the photographs also register distinct aspirations, attachments, and ways of organizing daily life. Rather than using deprivation as spectacle, Bendiksen attends to how people occupy constrained spaces and make them socially and personally specific.

The book’s design is central to that argument. Twenty double-gatefold photographs open outward so that the page can suggest the four enclosing walls of a resident’s home. This structure asks the reader to handle and enter each interior gradually, replacing the quick survey of a conventional documentary sequence with a more spatial encounter. Form and subject are therefore unusually close: the act of unfolding becomes a way of considering both the physical limits of a room and the lives assembled within it.

An introduction by author and journalist Philip Gourevitch places Bendiksen’s photographs within the wider realities of contemporary urbanization. For collectors, the book merits attention not because it offers a comprehensive account of urban poverty, but because it joins sustained international reporting to a publication design conceived specifically around the subject. It is a focused record of a historical demographic threshold, shaped by an approach that preserves the individuality of the people represented.