Klavdij Slubanwas born in Paris and spent his childhood in Slovenia. He returned to France to study. As a teenager, he was interested in photography but his love for literature took over. He then travelled wextensively in the former Soviet Union, Latin America, the Balkans, Japan, Jerusalem, Indonesia, the Caribbean and Bali. He started his photographic expeditions alone, with no backing, no commissions, no agency membership. Working on his own, photographing and producing a lstrong body of work. At the same time he set up a photography workshop for young prisoners at Fleury-Mérogis, in France inviting such photographer friends as Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud and William Klein. This was followed by similar workshops in Youth Prisons in the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union. In 2009 he received the European Publishers Award for Photography and the Leica Prize in 2004.
NB: What camera do you use?
KS : 3 parameters are necessary to take a photo: focus, speed and aperture. Therefore I use a manual camera. Finding the ideal combination between these 3 elements in various situations will have kept me busy most of my life...of course, I know there are such cameras that provide cappuccino or get real-time last sale and extended hours stock prices, but they are slightly bulgier, which is inconvenient for the kind of photos I do.
NB: What is your favourite filmstock?
KS : Film stock is for recording motion pictures or animations, isn'it? I only do photography, mainly black and white, with a film I've been using from the beginning that brings me my content of grain, asperity, roughness.
Using film implies the printing of the photo. The printing part requires skills and emotion.
NB: For the photos submitted, why are they your favourite?
KS : The photos that remain, at the end, have undergone such a tough series of selecting phases that the reason why they are here is their possibility to survive on their own but also for their capacity to never forget they belong to a wider circle called a cycle. I spend several years working on one cycle. I have been working on adolescents in jail since 1995. All photos from the cycle "East to East"
NB : You hold a Masters' degree in Anglo-American literature...how did you come to photography and how do you feel your background influences (or not) your photography?
KS : Creation is how to give shape to all that we carry within us. I am made of literature. It feeds me, it inspires me. When I read I see pictures, when I photograph...I don't think much, but the photos I keep at the end are those made of words rather than grains or pixels.
NB : You run workshops for Young Offenders in France and in the former Yugoslavia, can you please explain more about this.
KS : I've been running workshops in jails with teenagers in France, former Yugoslavia, former Soviet-Union and for six years now in Central America, mainly in Guatemala and Salvador. The idea is to offer these youngsters the possibility to have another vision of their immediate surrounding throughout the lens of a camera. This implies a lot of talking, questioning, debating, with a constant practical base. Taking photos, editing, preparing an exhibition within the jail. When I started the project in 1995, I had no idea about its issues. I am the first to be surprised I still wish to keep on. Probably because I believe that photography is reaching a point of no-return with the inflation of photos produced without an inner need. Doing workshops in jails, I do not ask myself metaphysical questions. The effect upon the prisoners is obvious, immediate, beyond words.
NB: Thank you Klavdij for leaving me speechless.
NB: Thank you Klavdij for leaving me speechless.
Klavdij Sluban