In nine days, Lana Slezic will give birth to her first child. But while most expectant mothers are taking the last days of gestation to rest and nest, this photojournalist is doing anything but. Instead, Slezic is in her native Toronto, organizing prints, submitting proposals to exhibitions (one to the Canadian High Commission in London and one to the Peer gallery in New York) and tying up loose ends for her move to New Delhi, which will happen five weeks after her son is born. Before flying back to Toronto, so she could give birth in her hometown, Slezic was based in Istanbul, shooting independently and taking assignments from Panos Picture Agency, which represents her.

For Slezic, this international travel schedule has become the norm. During the past four years, her curiosity for different cultures has spurred her to shoot life in war-torn Croatia, the tense military presence in Jerusalem, 21st-century Canadian Mennonites and, most notably, the lives of Afghan women in the years after the fall of the Taliban.

Her images—beautiful glimpses into sometimes harsh worlds—have found their way to the pages of The Guardian, The New York Times, Time and British Vogue, among other publications. Given her much-praised 2007 photo book Forsaken, Slezic’s work is a natural fit for shows like Fovea Exhibition’s “Dispatches from the Frontlines: 12 Women Photojournalists.”

“Lana’s is just a very fresh and new story to tell,” says Stephanie Heimann, director of the nonprofit Fovea in Beacon, New York. “We thought women’s rights [in Afghanistan] are still a frontline issue. We love Lana’s visual style and the lyrical narrative in her imagery. It’s beautiful, and people are very affected by her work.”

Moving in a New Direction

While Slezic’s portfolio has ensured her the confidence to go to the ends of the earth and produce salable images, ironically it was the study of movement that led to her career in still pictures.

Born in Toronto, Canada, Slezic’s love of athletics nudged her to major in kinesiology, the science of human movement, at the University of Western Ontario. But it didn’t stick. “When I graduated [in 1996], I knew that I didn’t want to do anything with this degree,” she explains. “So I traveled through Asia for six months. Before I left, my dad [an amateur photographer] gave me a manual Pentax and a couple rolls of film. I just found myself shooting everything and buying film constantly. I didn’t want to do anything else. It was like falling in love.”

From an Internet café in India, Slezic began researching photography programs. As soon as she returned to Canada, she enrolled at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario, to study photojournalism.

“Because I had just finished a four-year degree, I was looking for a program where I could delve into an intense course and get into the workforce,” says Slezic, who finished the program in a year. “I didn’t know much about the photographic industry,” she says. “But I knew you could work in newspapers. I didn’t want to do advertising, commercial or art photography; I wanted to document stories and people in their natural environments.”

Immediately out of school, Slezic got an internship at The Globe and Mail (Canada’s national newspaper) and went on to work at the Toronto Star. When her contract ended, Slezic didn’t push to stay.

“It was a fantastic training ground, but it wasn’t gratifying on a deeper level,” she says of her two years at newspapers. “I would get three or four assignments in a day, spending a half hour at each one, but I wasn’t storytelling. I was 25 or 26, and there was so much to do and see. I couldn’t see myself working there for the rest of my life. It wasn’t enough.”


Photographer for Hire

Slezic, who’d saved everything she earned, began freelancing and pitching stories to magazines instead. She got assignments from The New York Times in Canada and traveled to photography festivals trying to drum up more work. “You have to have a real sense of discipline to be able to do that: pushing, pitching, talking to people,” she says. Luckily, she had the chops. In March 2004, Canadian Geographic sent Slezic on a six-week assignment to cover the Canadian military in Afghanistan; she ended up staying two years.

“After the six weeks was up, I had hardly seen anything outside military life,” she explains. “I let everyone know I was staying; I knew a few journalists and started working with them. I moved into a house with other ex-pats and started freelancing, working for NGOs based locally and doing whatever other assignments I could find.”

But it was the lives of Afghan women that intrigued Slezic more than any other subject. The overall assumption that they had been “freed” since the Taliban was lifted in 2001 didn’t match Slezic’s observations.

“The world declared Afghan women saved and dropped [the issue],” says Slezic, who used a Nikon D100 to capture the series. “I learned quickly that things hadn’t changed at all—or not enough. This project overtook me. I hired a young Afghan woman as my translator and traveled all over the country pursuing stories.”

She shot everything digitally in color and says that with all the organizing and editing, shooting film there would have been almost impossible. “Afghanistan is quite bleak, with browns and earth tones, but the women are almost polar opposite,” she relates. “Once the burka came off, I was always so amazed by the beauty, the cosmetics, the jewelry and incredible femininity.”

The Afghan women’s stories and images led to a pile of tear sheets in publications like Mother Jones, The British Journal of Photography and National Geographic and make up Forsaken, Slezic’s first book, published by Mets & Schilt in Canada and powerHouse books in the U.S. Published internationally in 2007, Forsaken has garnered honors as one of the best photo books of that year, including PDN’s Photo Annual Best Photo Book category.

Though Slezic is proud of the book, its accolades and the 2008 World Press Award she recently received, her most gratifying outcome from Afghanistan has nothing to do with recognition. Farzana, the same young woman she hired as a translator, is now in Canada, studying photography.

“I’m incredibly proud that Farzana is here because I worked very hard to get her here,” Slezic says. “I think the most important thing for me was the ability to connect and learn about the lives of Afghan women on a very intimate level. It’s all about communicating these stories and doing it in a way that is accessible to people so they look at the photograph and want to know what it’s about.”

TECH BOX

Camera Nikon D100 Nikon D2X Lenses Two AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 17-55mm f/2.8G IF-ED Computers In Afghanistan, a Dell. Now, a MacBook Pro and Slezic says “would never go back.” Software Adobe Photoshop CS2