© Mats Åleklint

Žiga Koritnik has been capturing images of musicians since 1987. He lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he is a regular guest on the music scene and documents the Ljubljana jazz festival, the Druga godba festival, concerts in Cankarjev dom and various other events across Europe, both large and small, including Saalfelden jazz festival, Konrontationen in Nickelsdorf, Vienna jazz festival in Austria, Musique Mettisses in Angouleme, France, Womad in Reading, England and the Talos Festival in Ruvo di Puglia, Ai Confini Tra Sardegna E Jazz and Musica Sulle Bocche, Sardegna-Italy, and the Vision festival in New York. Since 1996 he has been a resident photographer of the Skopje jazz festival in Macedonia, where each year a calendar with his photos is published. In 2001 he held a major exhibition at the Skopje City Museum to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the festival, which was accompanied by a book predominantly featuring Koritnik’s photographs. In 2001 he spent seven weeks in New York, where he documented the Vision Festival and became acquainted with the musical and artistic events in the city. He was afforded the opportunity to exhibit in the Kavehaz Gallery in Soho.

In June 2006 he was invited back to New York to exhibit his work at the Vision jazz festival, at the Angel Orensanz Center. His photographs are regularly published in Slovene newspapers and magazines (including Delo, Mladina, Muska, and Fotografija) as well as in international publications (Time Out, Jazz Times, Jazziz, Signal to Noise, Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, Ballett Internationale, Village Voice, All About Jazz, Downbeat, Jazznyt, Jazzthetik, etc.).

He is also involved in theater photography and has regularly collaborated with Mladinsko gledališče Ljubljana for more that 20 years. He has worked with Iztok’s Kovač’s En-Knap dance company, documenting performances, and shooting an accompanying film of their performance Daleč od spečih psov (Far from Sleeping Dogs), as well as a film about composer Vinko Globokar, Krotilci časa (The Time Tamers) and Metod Pevec’s film Beneath Her Window, which got many awards at the Slovenian Film Festival and was the Slovenian candidate for the Academy Awards in 2005. From 1989 until August of 2006 he has been employed by the Slovenia’s national television station, Televizija Slovenija, as a TV and film cameraman, and has worked with directors Maja Weiss, Peter Braatz, Amir Muratović, Sašo Podgoršek and Michael Benson, and others. In 2001 he documented the making of Peter Greenaway’s Map to Paradise exhibition in Ljubljana, which was later that year followed by the publication of a book with extracts from his documentation of Greenaway’s film, the creation of which is still underway. In 1996 he self-published a book of photographs entitled Jazzy-ga! (Jazz-It!). To mark the occasion, he held an exhibition at a major European jazz festival in Saalfelden, Austria. He was invited back to the festival in 2003. His photos have also appeared in many books by other authors, including a book on the sculptor Jakov Brdar, whose sculpting of general Rudolf Meister he documented, and Colours of Music, published on the 20th anniversary of the Saalfelden Jazz Festival. Žiga Koritnik also created the cover of the Slovene translation of Miles Davis’ autobiography. He invited photographers Mauro D’Agati, Raffaella Cavalieri, Matthias Creutziger, Manfred Rinderspacher, Jak Kilby, Luca D’Agostino and Enid Farber to exhibit at the Ljubljana Jazz Festival in Slovenia and curated exhibtions “Because of Jazz” by Oliver Belopeta and “This is our music!”, group photo exhibition about Peter Brötzmann at Jazz festival Ljubljana. In 2004 he made a joint photography exhibition featuring the works of Slovenian music photographers. He has collaborated with the publishers of Mladinska knjiga magazines, and the company Hit Nova Gorica. He was a member of the Jazz Journalists Association. His photographs were included with CDs released by labels such as Tzadik, Intuition Music, Nika Records, Trost Records, The Thing Records and Leo Records. In 1997 the Italian photo magazine Zoom featured a presentation article on Žiga Koritnik. In 2005, his work was presented on 16 pages in Jazznin, a Japanese jazz magazine. He held more than 60 solo and 40 group exhibitions at home and abroad (Slovenia, Italy, USA, Austria, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Germany, France, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Monte Negro, Ireland, Japan…).

Since 2005, he is a regular visitor of Sardinia, Italy, where he documented the Musica Sulle Bocche Festival, Ai Confini tra Sardegna E Jazz Festival, and the Isola delle Storie Festival of Literature for seven years. In collaboration with Tumbarinos di Gavoi and Jana Project, he published their book about the Sardinian carnival in 2009. He still documents the carnival every year. In 2009 he published a book of black and white photo impressions of Lake Bohinj, Slovenia. He regularly organizes music and landscape photography workshops at home and abroad. He has received the Special Recognition Award at the Olympus photo competition in Japan, the Zlata diploma (Golden diploma) award for the annual report by HIT Nova Gorica and in 2017, Amigu Caru de Sos Tumbarinos in Gavoi / Sardegna. The internet edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica has an entry on Koritnik’s first website, created in 1996 (www.ljudmila.org/scca/koritnik/), under The Web’s Best Sites.