Why on earth would a seasoned, decorated photographer take a job at a local, small-town newspaper in the northern reaches of Norway?
That’s what we asked Jonas Bendiksen after he announced on Magnum’s blog that he’d be working at the Bladet Vesterålen newspaper, with a circulation of only 8,000, in the town of Sortland. In his blog post, Bendiksen writes, “We’ve heard it repeated countless times over the last decade: Newspapers are dying. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I do know I don’t want to die without ever having worked for one of these fine purveyors of information.”
But it turns out his decision is not simply a bout of extinction tourism brought on by nostalgia – it’s a personal challenge.
“I’ve fantasized for a long time about doing something like this,” says Bendiksen. “In much of my work, I’m often drawn to global, epic-scale issues – things that affect millions of people. I found that I was inspired to spend some time scaling down, and trying to look over time at a really small area, where nothing too obvious or dramatic was going on and to just see daily life in a fairly quiet place, one day at a time.”
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