Learn how to identify the singularity of a finished or in progress work, how to improve and affirm one’s personal style. Construct a plastic approach, an artistic coherence in the subjects’ angle.
Learn how to position oneself in space in order to find the fair distance with the subject, suggest a point of view. Develop a unique visual language, a photographic identity. Create a new series but also continue and improve a work in progress.
Klavdij Sluban was born on 3rd March 1963 in Paris. He spent his childhood in Livold (Slovenia). Secondary and higher education were performed in France. Gets passionate about photography when a teenager. In 1986, he obtains a Master’s degree in Anglo-American literature (“The teenager in the Anglo-American literature”), makes a black-and-white-print internship at Georges Fèvre’s workshop.
Main cycles are: Balkans-Transit; Around the Black Sea – Winter travels; Tokyo Today; Paradise Lost; Jerusalem(s); (Other shores – The Baltic Sea); Transsibériades (travels in Trans-Siberian: Russia and China); Central America – America to America; Entre parenthèses: young prisoners in Fleury-Merogis in former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union; Happy days on the island of Desolation (Kerguelen Islands); Living in exile (home of Victor Hugo Gernesey).
From 1995 to 2005, K. Sluban runs a story workshop at the Young Prisoners Centre in Fleury-Mégoris (Essonne), for teenagers whose works are exhibited at this prison at the end of each course. Henri Cartier-Bresson has come regularly to encourage them, as well as other photographers such as Marc Riboud and William Klein.
Since 1998, following this project, he works similarly with a dynamic and a photographic exchange with young prisoners in detention centres in the former Soviet-Union (Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Latvia), particularly at the disciplinary camps of Mozhaysk and Ikcha, near Moscow, of Kolpino, near Saint Petersburg, of Kaliningrad as well as in the disciplinary camps of Tbilisi and Khoni (Georgia), Lipcani (north of Moldova) and Cesis (Latvia). Since 2007, he has worked with teenagers’ gangs (“maras”) from Central America, installing workshops inside prisons of Zone 18 and of Chimaltenando in Guatemala, as well as in prisons of Izalco and Tonacatepeque in El Salvador.
Klavdij Sluban won several awards, including the EPAP prize, European Publishers Award for Photography (2009), the Leica prize (2004), the Niépce prize (2000).
His works are exhibited in major institutions, notably in recent years at the Museum of Photography in Helsinki, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Canton, at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, at the Museum Texas Tech, United States, at the Rencontres d’Arles, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, at the Pompidou/Beaubourg Center, in Paris. In 2013, the Niépce Museum dedicated him a retrospective, After dark, 1992-2012.
He has published several books, including Beirut Mission (Steidl), Entre Parenthèses, Photo Poche, (Ed. Actes Sud), Transverses (Ed. Maison Européenne de la Photographie), BalkansTransit, text by François Maspero, (Ed. du Seuil), Transsibériades, EPAP price 2009, published by 6 european publishers.
“You must ask yourself the question of the form, permanently. When you make a copyright work, you should ensure the garbage is full; you have to dismiss many things. Style is the balance between exterior evidence and an interior necessity. It is very difficult. At one point you think you have found something one could call a style, and you feel reassured by what you have found. The danger comes next, that is, the risk of falling into a kind of self-repetition.” Klavdij Sluban.
www.sluban.com
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