Inside story: what Jonas Bendiksen has learned from photographing isolated communities

"Photography, for me, has always been the tool I've used to explore things I'm curious about," says Magnum Photos photographer Jonas Bendiksen. "All my projects come from whatever questions I have about society at a given time. And I often end up looking at some sort of community that is on the margins, or someone who is outside the mainstream."

Satellites (2006), a body of work created over a seven-year period, focused on isolated communities on the fringes of the former Soviet Union. That was followed by The Places We Live (2008), for which Jonas spent three years photographing people living in urban slums in India, Kenya, Indonesia and Venezuela.

Although both projects deal with outsiders, Jonas says that has happened almost by accident. "I just sort of follow the things I'm interested in and then later discover they are not completely unrelated," he says. "But that's more of an afterthought. There's no master plan."

Photographing the community

One of the present-day Messiahs Jonas documented was Vissarion, a former traffic policeman who says that, in 1990, he received the revelation that he is the Christian Messiah reincarnated. He has around 5,000 followers, who live in a self-contained community, with schools and churches, in a remote part of southern Siberia.

Vissarion's story was the key to the whole Last Testament project. "I first heard about him when I was working as a freelancer in Russia in about 2000," Jonas remembers. "Around 2013 I started feeling drawn to create work around religion, so I decided to see if he was still out there. He wasn't hard to find, and that's when I started getting hits on some of the other claimants. That was when I fell into the rabbit hole, so to speak."

Jonas wrote to Vissarion's organisation and asked if it was possible to photograph the community. During the following year he made several visits, staying for about 10 days each time. Throughout, he felt it was important to approach Vissarion and his followers in an open-minded, non-judgmental way.

Jonas shot all his images using natural light and chose to work with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III (now succeeded by the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV), partly because of its low-light performance. "I've used all the 5D series cameras," he says. "One of the great things about the camera is that as I've upgraded, it's opened up low-light situations I would never have been able to photograph before. I also like the way the files look: they feel real, they feel organic."

Another reason he chose the Canon EOS 5D Mark III was its robust, weather-sealed body. "In the Siberian winter the working conditions were quite difficult," he recalls. "I took some images of the community's Christmas celebration, which is on 14 January because that's Vissarion's birthday. It was an outdoor pilgrimage and the temperatures went down to -30°C. I knew the EOS 5D Mark III would perform well in those conditions."

Even so, Jonas had to handle the camera carefully. "It was all about getting the camera in and out of my jacket when it was needed," he says. "I always shoot in manual mode, just from old habits, so I had to operate all the dials and buttons with huge gloves on."

Life on the outside

Looking back on his experiences with the Church of the Last Testament, Jonas says what surprised him most was his own reaction to the community.

"I almost felt that if I didn't have the various anchors I have at home, I could easily go and live there," he says. "I was moved by their way of life and their community and, temporarily at least, I could understand what it feels like to have that faith. I got to a point where I could really feel it. In a way, for me, that was mission accomplished.

"Most people's reaction is to think they're strange and far out, but the more time I spent digging, the more I found it difficult to decide what makes their beliefs and their Messiah any less plausible than any of the other things people believe."

Jonas says the project also taught him something about himself. "These people have the fortitude and strength, and sometimes the bravery, not to live along the mainstream trajectory," he says. "I think maybe some force in me is uncomfortable about living as conventionally as I do. There's something to be admired about life on the outside, and that's partly what fascinates me."