This post is also available in: French

Klavdij Sluban and Christine Delory-Momberger meet and speak about what they cherish most: photography. Klavdij Sluban is a French photographer of Slovenian origin, Christine Delory-Momberger is an academic, essayist, author of several publications on photography and books of interviews (Antoine d’Agata and Jane Evelyn Atwood). She is also an author / photographer.

In this book, Klavdij Sluban tells of his journey into exile and expresses his opinions on and commitments to photography. He says he is photographing because he lost his tongue. Caught between two languages, two countries, two places – Paris and his family’s village in Slovenia – nowhere he is truly at home. Documentary photographer, itinerant and independent (he does not belong to any agency), Klavdij Sluban carries out a challenging personal work and develops the question of confined spaces and constrained horizons in his images. Alone, he travels on foot, by train, bus, boat, letting the moment come without provoking it. Always working with his Leica and in black and white, he bonds to this camera, and the deep blacks of his images give a great intensity to his photographic writing.

His work cycles spread over several years, covering several countries or regions of the world: the Balkans where he shared a part of his journey with writer François Maspero – together, they published Balkans-Transit -, the shores of the Black Sea, the former Soviet Union, the coasts of the Baltic Sea, the Caribbean Islands, Jerusalem, Latin America, Asia with China, Japan and Indonesia, the Kerguelen Islands. Since 1995, he has been photographing teenagers in prison and regularly organizing photographic workshops with young prisoners, in Fleury-Mérogis, France, but also in the former Soviet Union (Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Latvia), in Slovenia, in Serbia, in Latin America (Guatemala, Salvador, Peru). He brought photography’s greatest names into his workshops: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud and William Klein.

Winner of numerous prizes (Academy of Fine Arts of the Institut de France 2015, EPAD prize, European Publischers Award for Photography 2009, Leica prize 2004, Niépce prize 2000, he has published numerous books of photographs including Entre Parenthèses, Photo Poche (Éditions Actes Sud), Tranverses (MEP) and Balkan Transit, text by François Maspero (Éditions du Seuil), Transibériades / East to East 2009 which was published in six languages.