Last year, a group of photographers from the Magnum agency were invited to reflect on the idea of “home”, each using the same medium-format camera. One of them, Jonas Bendiksen, a Norwegian photographer, has won international awards for his pictures of people just about as far away from home as can be – from isolated communities in newly independent states of the former Soviet Union to a book of photographs of urban slums around the world.
Turning his camera toward the intimate, Bendiksen used the opportunity to track the arrival of his new baby daughter, Billie, through his wife Anna’s pregnancy to the birth. In publishing the pictures in Magnum’s book Bendiksen, who has a photojournalist’s distrust of the familiar, is apologetic about them. “These are some of the most important pictures I’ll ever take,” he notes. “But not because they are necessarily very interesting for others to see.” You have the sense he needn’t have worried.
The picture on this page was the last of the home photographs Bendiksen took, showing Billie adrift on a table top amid the familiar plastic detritus of a children’s party. The deep infant sleep carries with it not only an ever-present trace of parental anxiety – what if Billie should roll? – but also an edge of lovely private comedy: what kind of world, of half-drunk dregs and abandoned shades and empty chairs has this child fallen into? In this week when baby photographs have been front-page news, it also goes to prove what newspaper picture editors have long known – that no other subject moves so effortlessly from the particular to the universal.
Home, a collaboration between Fujifilm and Magnum Photos, runs from 18-27 May 2018 at the Vinyl Factory, London W1. For more information and to buy the photobook go to home-magnum.com
