Jonas Bendiksen - The Book of Veles

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. 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 Vele