Here/Elsewhere: Jonas Bendiksen and the Digital Shift

In early 2016, as part of “A World in Color,” an ongoing project in partnership with Fujifilm and MPP (Heritage and Photography Library of Paris) to digitize the Magnum color archive in Paris, Jonas Bendiksen curated a selection of archived images of Nordic urban life from the 1960s to the 1990s.

What struck Bendiksen about these images was that people were enjoying public spaces with one element missing: smart phones. Traveling to Copenhagen and his home city of Oslo, Bendiksen created a new series in response to the archive, reflecting on how smart phones have changed our urban experience, shifting the way we navigate our environments and relate to each other. Photographed using the FUJIFILM GFX 100 II, and connected to themes in an ongoing long-term project, Bendiksen’s images raise questions around globalization, homogenization, and its effect on street photography. What does it mean to be present when our attention is also elsewhere? He continues the timeline where Magnum’s color archive ends, offering a modern dialogue from the digital age.

Jonas Bendiksen: Browsing through the Magnum color archive for the Nordic countries, I expected the familiar exoticisms — fjords, midnight sun, portraits of fair-haired people. What struck me most forcefully was something else entirely: the urban images. Here were images of everyday life from a distant era: people walking, shopping, dining and hanging out. Simply being somewhere.

Then I noticed the deeper absence: across thousands of frames, spanning decades — there is not a single photo of someone looking at a phone. Today, the streets are still full of people, but so often their attention is somewhere else — locked onto the glowing screen of their digital devices.

The unseen archive extends to roughly 2007, when most photographers were switching to digital cameras. This was also the year the first smartphone entered the market.

The archive ends precisely where the infrastructure of attention was about to change forever. I wandered around Oslo and Copenhagen with this in mind.

Discover more from“A World in Color” here.