35 Magnum photographers give their advice to aspiring photographers... must read!

Jonas Bendiksen, INDIA. Mumbai. 2006. A little girl playing in Laxmi Chawl, a neighborhood of Dharavi. The little lightbulb

Jonas Bendiksen

When did you first get excited about photography?

I first started in photography when I was about 14 or 15. I borrowed by father‘s SLR camera and very quickly I was taken by the process.Together with my father, I built a rudimentary BW darkroom in the bathroom at home. Over the years in high school, I ended up spendingmore and more time in there, photographing everything around me, developing the film, printing it, and back out photographing. By the time I finished high school I had to ask, Ok what do I do now? Find something else, or keep doing this, and give it a shot?

What advice would you give young photographers?

Throw yourself off a cliff. Figuratively speaking, I mean. Photography is a language. Think about what you want to use it to talk about. Whatare you interested in? What questions do you want to ask? Then, go for it, and throw yourself into talking about that topic, using photography. Make a body of work about that.

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