The western imagination often conjures a few images when it remembers the dissolution of the Soviet Union – Ronald Reagan pleading to Mikhail Gorbachev on national TV to tear the Berlin Wall down; David Hassellhoff; and the Chernobyl disaster. Such images narrate the tension between hope and despair and mark the end of the twentieth century, but the optimism this Western memory envisioned for the new Russia did not arrive. Rampant insider trading sold off state-owned civic entities, like the country’s electrical grid, to the highest (oligarchic) bidders, inaugurating a period of hyperinflation that devastated the general population. Russia was quickly erasing its Soviet past in the name of a hyper-capitalist future.
But Russia’s failures were not universal to all post-Soviet nations. Those who had long yearned for the independence they never surrendered began a long process of returning their histories that their old Soviet overlords had laid over them.
Perhaps the least known but most significant of those undertakings happened in Lithuania, the first of the Soviet states to separate from the USSR. Its western coast faces the Baltic sea, and is considered by the European Union to be one of the Baltic region’s cultural centers. Its largest city and capital Vilnius houses the country’s robust consortium of arts and culture museums, situated in Vilnius Old Town.
But it is in the country’s second-largest city where one of the preeminent institutions of art photography in Lithuania, and the entire region, continues to operate. The Kaunas Photography Gallery began as a project by the Lithuanian Society of Art Photography, which was established in 1969. Their exhibition activities began shortly after in the 1970s, when Lithuania was still a part of the USSR, alongside its robust publishing department, for which it has earned much renown.
Since then, the innumerable exhibitions and publications that the Society and Kaunas Gallery have operated and published were instrumental to the important social, cultural, and historical work that resisted and corrected Soviet-era and post-Soviet policies and histories. The critic Agne Narusyte argues that Lithuanian art photography revised and, in some ways, re-invented the concept of Lithuanian identity. Post-Soviet Lithuanian photography, Narusyte argues, offered a “counter-memory” to the official record; “hidden in photographic archives was like another, unofficial, channel of visual memory.” In the 1990s, “previously prohibited subjects of Soviet life” were foregrounded as a kind of collective political corrective to life under Soviet rule.
Lithuanian art photography has historically had little representation in North America. LW – C presents here a selection of a few of the most prominent artists from the mid century to today.
Antanas Sutkus – People of Lithuania
Antanas Sutkus (b. 1939) co-founded the Lithuanian Society of Art Photography. He studied journalism at Vilnius University. His archive was established in 2009, and his works are held in museums and galleries across Asia, North America, and Europe. People of Lithuania is one of his best-known works, and collects portraits taken from the 1960s and 1970s. “People in Sutkus’ photographs are not involved in some particular activities,” writes Margarita Matulyte, “they are not shooting, dying, undressing, or demonstrating some acrobatic maneuvers. They are simply standing about or moving slowly, engaged in some mundane affairs, but that is enough. The scene hits the nerve, touching so deeply that the sweet pain lingers for a long time onwards.”
Virgilijus Šonta - School Is My Home
The photographs in School Is My Home were rejected by Moscow authorities at the time of their exhibition, but Virgilijus Šonta (b. 1952, d. 1992) persisted in creating images that challenged the authorities. Taken entirely on the grounds of a school for special needs children from 1980 to 1983, the photographs are “devoid of any delusion of humanism,” writes Adam Mazur. “[Šonta] touched upon what is most important, upon that which, in its madness, not only contests an educational method derived from Ivan Pavlov, but also more broadly, evades the Soviet mechanism for the ‘perekovka’ [lit. “reforging”] of the spirit.”
Algirdas Šeškus - Grey But Not Grey
The most abstract of the photographers featured here, the work of Algirdas Šeškus (b. 1945) can be characterized by lacks and absences. The allergy to authorial perspective, the ambivalence of legible themes, and the continual attention to photography itself, rather than its subjects, identify the images in Grey But Not Grey. According to the Lithuanian Culture Institute, “his photographs from the 1970s and 1980s freeze fragments of an intimate and mysterious sensual life – distant and quietly opposing the official canon’s depiction of Soviet reality.”
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