Norwegian Jonas Bendiksen has recently published a photo-book on some of the biggest slum-districts in the world – including Jakarta. Jonas Bendiksen got familiar with the slums by living there for a number of months to establish contacts with locals. This enabled him to document the settings of the daily life in the slum, where families are crammed together under horrible conditions.
“It’s an incredibly small space. You can’t even stand up in it. As you can see, there’s no furniture in the room. But what I find so special about this house is the amount of attention devoted to the interior. Everything is beautifully decorated. They have made a kind of wallpaper from stickers. There are little portraits and other decorations on the wall. All the things that make a home anywhere in the world, you can find here too”, he explains in an interview with a Dutch radio station.
According to the Norwegian photographer, this situation is special for Indonesia, and he did not find similar examples in any other cities.
“In Jakarta slum dwellings can be found in the cave-like spaces around infrastructure, for example under bridges and next to railway lines”.
Slum-districts around the world are increasing and experts estimate, that a total of one billion people worldwide is living in slum.
