Henri Cartier-Bresson. L’imaginaire d’après nature

Transsibériades – Klavdij Sluban

The promenade exhibition, which was set up around the farm pond, featured a selection of large-format photographs tracing the artist’s trans-Siberian journey from the former USSR to China between 2001 and 2008. A winner of the Nièpce Prize (2000) and the Leica Prize (2004), Kalvdij Sluban (born Paris, 1963) is a French photographer of Slovenian origin. He grew up in Slovenia, which was where his visual universe developed, along with a particular mental image of the world, which was characterised by the contrasts between winter and autumn, between light and shade. Travelling, the journeys backward and forward between East and West which were a feature of his childhood, and then during his adult life, are one of his themes. In 1995, when he was leading a photography workshop at the young offenders’ prison in Fleury-Mérogis, he invited Henri-Cartier Bresson to take part. This led to a seven-year collaboration between the two artists.

The two men shared a fondness for Leica manual cameras, which they took with them everywhere they went. They worked slowly: they mingled among the crowd, blended into the landscape, tamed their subject, in order to capture it free from time pressures. Whereas Henri Cartier-Bresson captured the diversity of humankind in snapshots, with this sensitivity sometimes tinged with derision, Sluban, at the same time, showed the reality of the world and the intensity of his inner reality. His barren, practically lunar landscapes sometimes reflect absence, and sometimes the displacement of exile; his portraits, solemn in tone, illustrate the isolation of the human being in the face of destiny. In their two contrasting worlds, shade reveals light, and precision such as the careful choice of the frame, which enhances the image, is crucial.

The exhibition offered an opportunity to discover the parallel worlds of these two image poets, who came together, interacted, questioned each other, and linked the past and the present through a dialogue tinged with the subtle nuances offered by black and white photography.