Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos
In 2005, I started work on The Places We Live, a project about urban poverty and slums. For three years, I visited dozens of families in four slums around the world.
The Places We Live was not a search for finding the absolute extremes of urban poverty—I wasn’t looking for the dirties spot, the poorest hovels or the most crime-ridden street corner. My task was to find how people normalize these dire situations. How they build dignity and daily lives in the midst of very challenging living conditions.