The Places We Live

The year 2008 witnessed a major shift in the way people across the world live: for the first time in human history more people lived in cities than in rural areas. This triumph of the urban, however, did not entirely represent progress, as the number of people living in urban slums—often in abject conditions—reached its 1 billion mark the same year. This number was projected by the UN to double over the next few decades.

From 2005 to 2007 I documented life in the slums of four different cities: Nairobi, Kenya; Mumbai, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Caracas, Venezuela. I went in search for what daily life normalcy looked like in these different places. My aim was to record the diversity of personal histories and outlooks found in these dense neighborhoods that, despite commonly held assumptions, are not simply places of poverty and misery. Yet, slum residents continuously face enormous challenges, such as the lack of health care, sanitation, and electricity.

The Places We Live includes twenty double-gatefold images, each representing an individual home and its denizen’s story.