Antanas Sutkus

In 1959, Antanas Sutkus (born 1939) began photographing on the streets of Vilnius, then the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania. Together, these images offer a humanist outlook on daily life as it was offered to him by his fellow citizens.

Childhood is a theme that Sutkus (born 1939) has returned to again and again, presenting its myriad facets as well as the many interactions between the lives of children and adults. “Childhood is the most important platform for me as a photographer,” says Sutkus; “Children live in a different world. Sometimes I succeeded in showing that world: not the real world customary to us, but their world. Children live on another planet than earth.”

With an unfailingly respectful yet astute eye, Sutkus depicts children together with their parents and relatives, with their friends, at play or hard at work in school. He captures not merely the pleasures of childhood but also its deprivations, the difficulties involved in raising children, loneliness alongside belonging, as well as the inevitable crises of childhood that can have a lifelong impact. For Sutkus, children occupy a life phase that transcends national and cultural borders.

Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus (born 1939) learned of the mass killing of the Jews during World War II itself, from his grandparents, experiencing shame and guilt for the atrocities committed behind the Vilijampole ghetto gates and the Ninth Fort. In 1988 Sutkus began photographing the Kaunas Jews who had escaped death in concentration camps; In Memoriam presents a selection of these portraits.

As far back as the 14th century, the Jews had been offered protection and support in Lithuania. Over the next 600 years they established their traditions there, with printing workshops and synagogues, libraries and gymnasiums, songs and legends. This vibrant branch of Lithuania’s cultural history was violently destroyed when 200,000 Jews were murdered and thrown into pits on forest edges, quarries and death camps. This book is a tribute to these people, and an expression of attempts at understanding, penitence, purification and rebirth.

Antanas Sutkus (born 1939) ranks among Europe's great humanist photographers. Although he lived and worked in occupied Lithuania on the periphery of the Soviet Empire, he profoundly influenced Soviet photography in terms of form and content. Sutkus developed his visual language in the 1960s, establishing the foundation for the Lithuanian school of photography. He was interested in absolutely everything: children, lovers and the elderly, modernity and tradition, joy and painful farewells, nature and the city.

Sutkus' photographs invariably revolve around Lithuania and its people; they were his "Kosmos" in which he found a place for everything, and he formulated his zest for their lives in his long-term project The People of Lithuania. Sutkus' undertaking was a bold one during the Cold War and under Soviet domination; his pictures were an expression of personal life behind the Iron Curtain.