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The Book of Veles

The Book of Veles

by Jonas Bendiksen

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Jonas Bendiksen’s exploration of the North Macedonian town of Veles mixes fake news and documentary photography with ancient Slavic mythology. Through this project, Bendiksen seeks to pose critical questions around photography, trust and the representation of reality.

Awards: Shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards 2022 in the Author Category.

More about this book

Veles is a provincial town of 40,000 inhabitants which has lost much of its economic base in recent decades—an enormous steel smelter, a porcelain factory and other industry lie abandoned. During the 2016 US presidential election, the town became a hub for ‘Fake News’ production. Tech-savvy local youth created hundreds of clickbait websites posing as American political news portals with the intent of earning quick money from viewer ad clicks. As the Veles fake news articles were spread to millions of people via Facebook and Twitter algorithms, many of these ‘news hackers’ made substantial sums, and the sites may have contributed to the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

Bendiksen travelled to Veles in 2019 and 2020 to photographically explore this unlikely hub of misinformation. The photographs of contemporary Veles are intertwined with excerpts and facsimiles from a 1919 archaeological discovery called ‘the Book of Veles’ —a cryptic collection of forty ‘ancient’ wooden boards discovered in Russia by an army officer, written in a proto-Slavic language. It was claimed to be a history of the Slavic people and the god Veles himself—the pre-Christian Slavic god of mischief, chaos and deception. While popular among Slavic nationalists, the text is debunked as a forgery by most scientists.

In this ‘new’ The Book of Veles by Bendiksen interweaves these two different ‘Veles’ stories, representing historical and current efforts at producing disinformation and chaos. Every character in Bendiksen’s book, is a digital 3D model avatar inserted into otherwise empty pictures. Every image in the book is a manipulation. The project It is both a reckoning with Bendiksen’s own background as a classical photojournalist as well as a look at where technology might lead journalism in the immediate future.

Published April 2022 / US Publication date July 2022
(Third printing)
220 x 165 mm, 148 pages
65 images, 19 reproduction of historical pages
Hardback with thin boards
Cover with satin silver foil on a fake leather material
ISBN 978-1-910401-61-3

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  • Jonas Bendiksen (b. Norway, 1977) 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 Soviet Union, a project that was published as the book Satellites (2006). In 2005, with a grant from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, he started working on 'The Places We Live', a project on the growth of urban slums across the world, which combines still photography, projections, and voice recordings to create three-dimensional installations. Bendiksen has received numerous awards, including the 2003 Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York, and second place in the Daily Life Stories for World Press Photo, as well as first prize in the Pictures of the Year International Awards. His documentary of life in a Nairobi slum, Kibera, published in the Paris Review, won a National Magazine Award in 2007.

    His editorial clients include National Geographic, Geo, Newsweek, The Independent on Sunday Review, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Telegraph Magazine, and The Rockefeller Foundation.