This time, we suggest you enter the scene of Lithuanian photography through the open door on, beginning from the works of Algirdas Šeškus. Most of his seemingly casual snapshots had remained unprinted for a long time. The reason – they did not correspond to the concept of humanist photography, its compassionate representation of people occupied with their everyday lives. What Šeškus photographed was too ambiguous. He worked as a cameraman for the Lithuanian national television from 1975 to 1985, and he also carried a camera with him everywhere he went. He would take it out and use his spare moments to capture people: waiting in the corridors for their turn to enter the studio, preparing for shootings, cameramen filming dancers or singers performing on stage, or politicians giving speeches. Yet the cameraman’s position gave him an opportunity to see reality as if from two points of view simultaneously. 

On the one hand, Šeškus filmed and transmitted scenes composed by others where everything was in its right places, where each gesture or movement was supervised by the director. We must remember that television was strictly controlled as a means of propaganda under the Soviet regime. Everything had to be checked and signed by a special committee in charge of not letting the public receive any ideologically unsuitable messages, symbols, or stories. Television could broadcast only the image of an alternate reality, one where people, guided by the Party, enthusiastically marched toward Communism. So much effort was necessary to convince citizens that everything was going according to plan, that harvests were abundant, that industry and culture were thriving, precisely because this was not what people experienced every day. They saw empty shelves in grocery stores and had to queue for hours if anything edible appeared in stock; they had to repair any new equipment they bought, because nothing was operational. Cultural expression lacked the necessary level of freedom. It was, too, controlled by the authorities similarly bent on prohibiting the spread of poisonous modernist ideas or the display of inexistent aspects of Soviet life, such as religion, sex, and poverty. 

On the other hand, nobody saw how Šeškus composed the image as he photographed it; thus, he changed the meaning of the scenes. First of all, in his photographs, people appear to be further away from the spectator than on TV, and the grey space of the studio becomes larger, more oppressive, like a cage containing the performers. Their presence on stage looks less significant, even incidental. Rather than doing something important, worthy to be shown to everyone in the country, they appear idle, as if waiting for something to happen. The photographs are also open to various interpretations. One could see here Šeškus’s reflection on the truth of being, which reveals itself only when we are still, undistracted by entertainment or mundane chores, distanced from the shimmering spectacle of television that so easily fills our lives with the irrelevant. But it is also possible to understand these photographs as fractures in the propagandist illusion that television had to create. Thus, most of them were never printed and remained in a hidden counter-archive during the Soviet period, providing us a frame for perceiving Lithuanian humanist photography presented in this exhibition. The five selected photographers, even while candidly documenting reality, penetrate its gaps and fractures by seeking authenticity behind the sickly Soviet façade. 

Romualdas Požerskis would have been the most obviously unsuitable to represent the official Soviet culture, because he began photographing religious festivals in 1974, a practice he maintained well after the Soviet era, up to 2001. Art on religious topics was banned under the Soviets; therefore, he could exhibit only the photographs that did not contain anything related to the church or its rituals. Officially, the series was titled Country Celebrations and showed villagers enjoying themselves, with the context remaining undisclosed. In fact, religious festivals would take several days in designated towns in the summer, attracting people from all over the country. State-wide, the government had closed many churches, while the people who were seen visiting churches would lose their jobs, and children at school were taught that God does not exist. But still, religion was not eradicated completely, and its customs persisted. Rural folk who worked in the collective farms had no important positions and thus were free to travel to church festivals. They would arrive in horse-drawn carriages; after having made their confessions, they would repent, lie prostrate, follow the path of the Christ’s Passion, attend Mass, and participate in the processions. This was concluded by spreading tablecloths with food and drinks on the grass and celebrating. For relatives and friends who lived far away, these church festivals provided a rare opportunity to see each other and catch up. Požerskis preferred to photograph this particular aspect of church festivals. He liked to observe people and horses. He also tried to compose each image so that it would contain a tree, which was sacred to the older generations of Lithuanians and their ancestors, the last European pagans who accepted Christianity only in 1387. The belief that the spirits of nature lived in trees had somehow survived alongside the Catholic faith. Yet around 1980, Požerskis noticed that people started arriving to the festivals by cars. Their habits changed: instead of meeting and communicating with each other, they would perform the rituals and leave. Thus, the tradition became less interesting to photograph. 

Another gap, although not as dangerous to the Soviet authorities, were country markets, photographed by Aleksandras Macijauskas from 1968 to 1980. Markets were an interstice in the Soviet system because private property, as well as private business, did not officially exist. At first, markets were even prohibited, but since collective farms did not manage to produce enough food, the authorities allowed markets to function on the margins of the economy. Eventually, they became a necessary part of life because this is where people found the items they needed, not diluted or desaturated, while the shops remained empty. Here villagers would bring to sell their own produce cultivated on family farms – fresh, rarely available, and real food products like sour cream, butter, meat, cheese, apples etc. They would also sell the offspring of their livestock and birds, thus slightly enlarging their meagre salaries earned from working in the collective farms.

But Macijauskas was not interested in the commercial aspects of the markets. He focused on people, objects, and animals, on textures, light sources, and shadows, gestures and facial expressions. He favored the wide-angled lens and would approach people as close as possible, sometimes sustaining beatings for such curiosity. Soviet art critics described Macijauskas as someone who wished to get closer in order to see the soul of the sour cream. He wanted to capture an authentic human face without a mask concealing the precarious coexistence of good and evil. The rural folk photographed by Macijauskas are far from the traditional, idealized Lithuanians other photographers liked to portray. They are rough and greedy, often compared to the animals they keep. The photographer shows how the chaos reigning in markets contains its own logic and irregular geometry as opposed to the regularity of cities and ideologies. Macijauskas comes as close as possible to the uncivilized aspects of human nature, but instead of being frightened by it, he laughs. Not at the villagers, but at the absurdity of existence and the fragility of the less-than-beautiful being. This is a laughter ringing from the viscera of sorrow.

The same country folk look completely different, even opposite, when relaxing by the Baltic Sea in Palanga, a place loved by Algimantas Kunčius. His father-in-law had a house there, and Kunčius would come there every summer and photograph the seaside from 1965 to 2015. As time passes, we see how people change, how the Soviet culture of this resort morphs into a capitalist one. Only the Palanga Pier remains the same, as well as the ritual performed on it: every evening, people walk to the end of the pier to bid farewell to the setting sun. This moment feels more solemn if one stands further away from the coast, detached from one’s worries and reality, suspended between the water and the sky. Under the Soviet occupation, this cosmic event would also inspire thoughts about the inaccessible West, because everyone knew that Sweden was right there where the Sun would disappear under the horizon. 

Yet the seaside has also a special meaning in Lithuanian culture. Although the country has always had access to the Baltic Sea, its coast was occupied by German crusaders in the 13th century. For a long time, only Palanga remained as a small Lithuanian trade and fishing port. The capital Vilnius and other major cities were situated further away from the sea and the crusaders. The region became part of Lithuania in 1923, and the seaside turned into a major holiday destination. Since then, people who lived in urban centers or in the countryside imagined the seaside as a space of freedom and peace. While working all year round, Lithuanians dreamt of traveling to the sea, of abandoning themselves to the infinity of water and sand. In the 1960s, Kunčius began photographing rural folk on the beach as he was intrigued by their appearance – how strange they looked in their Sunday best by the sea, as if they had come to church. Upon stepping on the sand and into the water, elderly people would turn into children. Children were also there, splashing water on their grandparents or building sandcastles. The mythological goddess Jūratė had emerged out of her underwater amber castle to pose as a cardboard prop so that people could get their picture taken by the seaside. The photographer could not help himself but compare the flawless body of the Lithuanian mermaid with the imperfect bodies of the bathers. 

The latter brings us to the last Lithuanian participant of this exhibition, Violeta Bubelytė. She became famous when she started photographing herself naked in 1982. At first, she would half-hide her body behind sheets of cardboard, curtains, cloths, or mirrors. Photographing nudes was semi-forbidden under the Soviet regime. On the one hand, male photographers would invite young women to participate in photo sessions and photograph beautiful female bodies in natural surroundings, thus perpetuating the patriarchal myth of women as part of nature rather than culture. Those nudes would be exhibited or published in magazines, but it would only take for someone to denounce such displays of vulgarity before a governmental committee intervened, forcing the photographers to close their exhibitions or firing the editor of any such treacherous magazine. All this happened because the act of photographing naked bodies was understood to be production of pornography. 

Thus, the fact that a woman began photographing herself naked violated all taboos. Bubelytė was attacked from all sides: older male photographers mocked her for exposing herself, and women wrote letters to the editors of newspapers complaining that only prostitutes could look at such dirty images. Bubelytė didn’t pay any attention to any of that. She used her body as an accessible model that could easily be told to do what she wanted. Rather than eroticizing the body, she performed a solo performance in front of the camera. By using gestures, signs, or props, Bubelytė was commenting on the history of painting, religious truths, or the certainties of patriarchal culture. Her body was simply a live material for sculpture or a means of recording a woman’s existence. 

Bubelytė might have also appeared as a character locked up in the gray cell of Soviet existence like the actors, singers, and dancers photographed by Šeškus. In fact, by choosing their subject matter and an individual point of view, all five photographers have found mental escape from the ideological frame imposed by the Soviet system. And their works tell us something profound about the ambiguity, vulnerability, and playfulness inherent in the human condition.