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Klavdij Sluban is a traveller for whom high seasons and travel commerce mean little. From countries generally considered unvisitable, too poor, too sad and grey, he brings back a harvest of pictures, always in black and white. The basis of his photography is time and people – people he would not dream of staring at. For Sluban is no paparazzo of reality, he is a photographer on a human scale.
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‘Transsibérien’
Klavdij Sluban
Photography
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‘Après Balkan-transit’
Klavdij Sluban
Photography
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‘Transsibérien’
Klavdij Sluban
Photography
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‘Prison Zona 18, Guatemala’
Klavdij Sluban
Photography
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‘Mediterranean Journey’
Klavdij Sluban
Photography
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‘Pologne’
Klavdij Sluban
Photography
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‘Centre des jeunes détenus’
Klavdij Sluban
Photography
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Klavdij Sluban crosses abandoned Far Eastern towns on foot — what happened to their inhabitants? A few are still here, wrapped up in the fog, like fleeing animals or with their backs to the wall. Searching for people, the photographer traveled outside Europe, penetrating into Asia, Russia, Mongolia, China, on the Trans-Siberian railway, yet he never encountered a density of population. Everywhere, the physicality of the land has taken over and rendered negligible the human species. Klavdij Sluban was nostalgic for the snow of his childhood, which surrounded him in his corner of the world, here the snow has become a white cancer: it doesn’t cover the ground, but consumes it. The silence is oppressive.
The photographer seldom uses a fast exposure to capture a movement or a journey. More often, he leaves the camera open for a long time, so that the silence impregnates the film. Stillness needs time to rise to the surface. Stillness is the state of grace of a messianic moment, not the exaltation of an arrival, but the end of a journey. — Extract from a preface by Erri de Luca for the book ‘Transsibériades’
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Azurebumble 