Matjaz Krivic
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Matjaz Krivic is a documentary photographer specializing in capturing the personality and grandeur of indigenous people and places. For 15 years he has covered the face of the earth in his intense, personal and aesthetically moving style that has won him several prestigious awards. He has made the road his home and most of the time you can find him traveling with his camera somewhere between Sahara and Himalaya.
2016 - World Press Photo
- Editorial
- Environment
- Landscape
- Portrait
Digging the Future
Matjaz Krivic
Yakuba emerges from the 50m deep hole after another 11 hour long workday underneath the panorama of eastern Burkina Faso. Unfortunately, he and his team did not manage to find any gold today. Last year his uncle and two of his friends died when a nearby mine collapsed. News? Not at all, it is a part of the everyday life in this part of the country.
What sort of a future is the barely sixteen year old Yakuba digging for himself, as he and his companions keep bringing bags full of stones from the depths of the shafts - some up to 60 metres deep and incredibly narrow - and as he breaths the black earth full of poisonous lead, day in, day out? Future? Anything that keeps him from thinking about today or tomorrow: while grinding the ore, the heavy metals attack his lungs, find their way into the soil and into his drinking water. The mercury and cyanide that he needs in order to extract the gold which then shine for the clients destroy his body and poison the soil he lives in forever.
Urbanistan - the story of a quiet loudness
Matjaz Krivic
As soon as you hear the word Urbanistan your imagination is whisked off into the traffic mayhem of Calcutta, the tawdriness of the neon sex nightlife in Bangkok, the unbelievable structuralised yet frenzied Tokyo, the suffocating and dusty streets of the (hardly) living body of the decaying Cairo.
However, Urbanistan is a miraculous anti-thesis to all this. It is a story from the other side – a story of the quiet loudness on the margins of total existential, religious, economic and geopolitical chaos. A story that speaks of the indestructible spirit and the eternal search of inspiration that enables survival. It is a story of individuals and social groups who, putting aside the racket and general urban angst, keep searching for the core of existence in a different space and a different time. It is a story of survival through play, prayer, tradition, rituals, travels, socialising and especially, a special light, that the author of the project sees and records so well.
Tribe - Somewhere under the Rainbow
Matjaz Krivic
As far as new age social utopias go, it’s doesn’t get any more spectacular than the Rainbow Gathering. With members in the tens of thousands and a long spanning tradition in every imaginable alternative lifestyle, the Rainbow tribe certainly knows how to put together a happening. It began with the counter-culture “dropout” movement in the USA and a disappointed generation searching to start society from scratch by moving to remote rural areas, far from the reach of their corrupt industrial civilisation. Temporary hippy villages started popping up all over the globe to accommodate the ever growing new age nomadic community, all the while maintaining an air of secrecy and mystique - locations and dates typically spread through word of mouth and are communicated in a romanticized tribal language of full moons, rivers and mountains. Rainbow gatherings soon developed their own ethos, rituals and fashion - the “Sioux chief meets Himalayan sadhu” image being the most popular.
