DECEMBER 6, 2021 “MY WORK IS about telling the truth, about capturing it, about showing it and about presenting it,” writes the Norwegian photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen in an introductory essay to The Book of Veles, his latest volume of photographs. “The truth is what you see, and it’s the essence of photography.” In 2019 and again in early 2020, just before the onset of the pandemic, Bendiksen traveled to the small city of Veles on the Vardar River in North Macedonia. The trips were inspired by a series of press reports, beginning in the late stages of the 2016 US presidential campaign, which revealed that Veles was a major source…