Ciril Jazbec

Ciril Jazbec (1987) is a documentary photographer born in Slovenia. He studied management at the Faculty of Economics before moving to London, where he studied Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, obtaining an MA in 2011. In just a few years of international work, he received several awards – amongst them the Leica Oskar Barnack Award and an award at the Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2013, both for his photo story On Thin Ice, which also won MAGNUM 30 under 30 in 2015. He has been working as a contributing photographer for National Geographic Magazine since 2014.

His work has appeared in printed and online magazines – National Geographic, The New York Times, GEO Germany, GEO France, Der Spiegel, The Sunday Times, La Repubblica, WIRED UK, Bloomberg Businessweek, Neu Zürcher Zeitung, Leica Fotografie International, Leica M Magazine, Marie Claire Italy, National Geographic Traveler. His projects took him to Kiribati and Alaska, and later to Uganda and Greenland.

His lens is focused on sustainability, on man-made changes in nature caused by our constant search for progress and development, which may have a fatal impact on man and his continued life on the blue planet. For a series of photographs titled The Ice Stupas, which he took in northern India and were published in National Geographic magazine, he received The World Press Photo 2021 (Environment category, Stories, 2nd Prize). In 2023, Ciril Jazbec was awarded the Meridian Grant by the National Geographic Society as a National Geographic Explorer, enabling him to spend a month documenting the lives of the young Inuit generations in Greenland.

In 2025, with the portrait of Leona (Between Ice and Light #0002, 2024), Jazbec was awarded the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize, which every year showcases the very best of contemporary photography in a group exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London.