Les Rencontres d'Arles Rencontres d'Arles: expositions, stages photo / exhibitions, photo workshops.

This exhibition presents, at the Magasin Électrique, the photos taken during trans-Siberian journeys in China, Mongolia and Russia and published in the book East to East (Transsibériades) by Klavdij Sluban, winner of the European Publishers Award for Photography in 2009.

He travels by train in the Far East, searching for living creatures: fleeing animals and humans caught in the oppressive immensity and infinite silence that are always so extraordinarily perceptible in his work.

‘This area of consumed hatred is where Klavdij Sluban comes from, with Leica over shoulder and black-and-white film, to tell of the Easts to people who barely know there is one East. The photographer’s standpoint clouds the issue. This casts shadows, and so the snow is dark, the light is washed-out white, exiled on the surface.’ ‘The photographer rarely uses fast shutter speeds. He usually sets a longer pause for the closed aperture, so that silence pervades the film. Stillness needs more time to appear. Stillness is the state of grace of the messianic moment. It does not exalt what went before; it is the end of something.’

Erri De Luca

www.sluban.com

Exhibition held by Le Méjan association, and produced by Galerie Taïss and Galerie de l’Hôtel de Sauroy, Paris.

Klavdij Sluvan

Born in Paris in 1963.

Klavdij Sluban spent his childhood in Slovenia before studying in France. He took up photography as a teenager before devoting himself to it completely after studying literature. He then travelled widely in the former Soviet Union, Latin America, the Balkans, Japan, Jerusalem, Indonesia, the Caribbean and Bali. He carried out his photographic expeditions alone, with no backing, no commissions, no agency membership. Working on the fringe, he produced his own rigorously demanding body of work. At the same time he set up a photography workshop for young prisoners at Fleury-Mérogis, inviting such photographer friends as Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud and William Klein. He followed up this venture with similar workshops in disciplinary camps in the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union. In 2009 he received the European Publishers Award for Photography.

EXHIBITIONS