Tom Kleinbeg, photographer and music video director

Graduating from the Bachelor Photographer and Videographer in 2023, Tom Kleinberg is a multidisciplinary artist. His work is distinguished by an intimate and engaged exploration of marginalized communities. His "Forgotten in the dark" series on the ballroom scene in Seoul and Paris was exhibited at the Circulations Festival in 2024.

He shares his experience and advice on how to get started in photography and video as a young artist.

I left school with the determination to pursue both my professional and personal projects. Today, I make my living from photography and video.

I was lucky enough to make contacts with artistic directors during the master class organized by GOBELINS in partnership with Universal in 3rd year. This gave me my start in the world of music videos.

At the same time, my work in photography quickly took off. My 3rd year dissertation on ballrooms in Korea was exhibited at the Circulations festival in spring 2024, enabling my project to continue after school.

"Forgotten in the dark - Tom Kleinberg

Thanks to social networks, it's a very important tool! Today's artists are obliged to wear many hats, advertising themselves on their networks and their website. It's a tedious but crucial job.

When I left school, I continued to develop my personal projects so as to have material to share on my networks. I also created a lot of contacts by systematically sending a DM to people who had just subscribed to my account. I didn't always get a response, but these initial contacts were very useful later on, when my projects began to be more widely distributed and my contacts realized that I'd already approached them 4 months earlier.

That's the question all artists ask themselves. For me, style and desires evolve throughout an artist's career.

I try to analyze the images I like, to understand how they are constructed and what attracts me. Our aesthetic is inevitably influenced and shaped by the images we consume. It's by analyzing them that you can really become aware of your work and develop your own aesthetic.

Clip Uzi Freyja - "Don't Disturb Me" directed by Tom Kleinberg

I finished my film and audiovisual degree in 2019 and moved to Taiwan on a whim to discover the country. I worked in a drag cabaret as a photographer. I was able to see the importance of these places of encounter and expression for queer communities.

With the arrival of the COVID, all nightclubs were closed and declared non-essential, just like art and culture.

It was in this context that I took the entrance exam for GOBELINS in 2020, with the idea of continuing to explore these themes in mind. When I started work on the diploma project, the Taiwanese borders were still closed. I researched other queer communities in Asia and discovered the ballroom world in Korea.

Taiwan was the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage. There's a real political and cultural will in the country to highlight the links between queer art and culture.

On the other hand, Korea still stigmatizes queer communities. In the West, we know the country's cultural scene mainly through Kpop and drama. I thought it would be interesting to show the place of queer culture in this very commercial vision of Korean culture. So my project moved from Taiwan to Korea.

"Forgotten in the dark - Tom Kleinberg

The main difficulty is to achieve a balance between "food" and artistic projects. It's not easy to resist the temptation to do only commercial projects. Artistic projects are not always lucrative, but they bring credibility to our work.

You also have to be careful not to offer prices that are too low when you're starting out. It's difficult for young artists to impose their own rates, but if your fees are too low, they'll discredit your work and have a negative impact on the market for other photographers and videographers.

I haven't collaborated with other alumni, but I still work a lot with the make-up artists and hairs stylists I met at GOBELINS. We did a master class with D-MAI, a make-up school, and I met a lot of make-up artists through that.

On the other hand, a number of us from my graduating class have kept in touch. We meet regularly in a café to work on our respective projects, exchange ideas and give each other our opinions. Photography and video can be very solitary activities, so these coworking sessions allow me to feed myself creatively and get feedback on my work.

Clip Keiona -" Watch Me", directed by Tom Kleinberg

The advice I've often given to students from classes below mine is to make the most of everything GOBELINS has to offer. When you're a student, you have the luxury of time and access to the school 's studios and equipment.

You have to take advantage of this to try things out, to feed your portoflio, to make mistakes. I think it's very important and very formative to be able to make mistakes and experiment with lots of things.