Klavdij Sluban, Prix de Photographie Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière – Académie des beaux-arts 2015

Klavdij Sluban is the recipient of the 2015 Prix de Photographie Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière—Académie des beaux arts for his project Divagation—sur les pas de Bashô (Divagation—in Bashô’s footsteps), a poetic journey inspired by Basho’s travels across seventeenth-century Japan.

Klavdij Sluban submitted a project to the jury which was inspired by his reading of Matsuo Bashô (1644–1694), a Japanese poet regarded as one of the masters of haiku. Sluban’s reading centered on the poet’s travel journals written in a “mix of prose and poetry, stories that wander out of time and space, an incursion into utopia.” Sluban wanted to photographically transcribe Bachô’s journey of initiation from a sensible, rather than documentary, point of view, by recording the poetic essence at each stage of the journey. This free-spirited peregrination is reflected in a series of portraits of present-day Japanese.With each portrait   a text in which the subjects express their personal feelings about contemporary Japan.