Moldova, Transdniester, 2004, by Jonas Bendiksen

Jonas Bendiksen’s sharply evocative images explore themes of community, faith and technology.

Bendiksen was born in Norway in 1977. He began his career at the age of 19 as an intern at Magnum’s London office before leaving for Russia to pursue his own work as a photojournalist. Throughout the several years he spent there, Bendiksen photographed stories from the fringes of the former USSR, a project that was published as the book Satellites (Aperture, 2006).

In 2017 he published The Last Testament (Aperture), which told the story of seven men who all claimed to be the biblical Messiah returned to earth. The Book of Veles (Gost, 2021) probed the vulnerabilities of our perceptions, and became hotly debated after Bendiksen revealed that what had appeared to be a classical piece of photojournalism was in large part synthetic computer-generated renderings.