Romualdas Kęstutis Augūnas is a Lithuanian photographer, whose name is primarily related with travel photography. One may say that the other way round as well: R. Augūnas is a traveller, inseparable from a photo camera. His travelling routes have led him to many countries, which are distant from us in geographical as well as in cultural terms, but the author was mostly famed by mountaineering photographs . Many photographers created their most important works during their journeys and have left a distinct trace in the world history of photography. The list of such photographers could begin with the travellers of the 19th century and end with such rovers as American Robert Frank.
But in Lithuania there are few authors for whom travels are not only a source of creative inspiration, but also an important accent of the lifestyle. Vitas Luckus, who travelled through Georgia, Russia and Armenia, stood out from the generation that debuted in the sixties and formed a base of the Lithuanian photography school. The works of a traveller, cameraman and photographer Juozas Kazlauskas are remarkable for their wide geographical range. A representative of a younger generation Virgilijus Šonta took pictures “on the road” in the seventies and eighties. Today Paulius Normantas registers peculiar Eastern culture and everyday life in his photographs. Other well-known Lithuanian authors took pictures in foreign countries too (for example, Antanas Sutkus in Bulgaria, Aleksandras Macijauskas in Japan), but the core of their oeuvre consists of photography which is Lithuanian in terms of content and form. Meanwhile for young Lithuanian artists travels give not only and not so much physical, but mental space for conceptual creative work, in which there is no place left for travel photography conceived in a traditional way.
However, in the new R. Augūnas’ photo album there are no views of distant countries or photographs of snowy mountain peaks, which have significantly increased a variety of geographically narrow panorama of the Lithuanian photography school. By presenting his new book R. Augūnas sort of recoils on his native country, returns home once more , and this return is not as unexpected as it may seem at the first glance. Even taking photographs in the mountains, R. Augūnas registered not only impressive compositions of snow and rocks, but also took pictures of a man surrounded by mountains or standing on peaks. In R. Augūnas’ photographs psychological portraits of a man and subjects from his life in the mountains are of equal or even greater importance than magnificent views of nature. According to a photography and cinema critic Skirmantas Valiulis, “it was a man that interested R. Augūnas the most in Lithuanian countryside as well as in the Pamirs near the border of Afghanistan” . Therefore there’s no surprise that the Lithuanian photographer is ascribed to human-interest photography. The wish to show that “people of all nations are concerned by the same problems and therefore are very close to each other”  relates R. Augūnas to the above mentioned trend in photography.
If you envisage humanistic content behind the visual form of photographs, which shimmer with snow and are etched with black rocks, or behind the exotica of pictures from distant lands, it’s not hard to notice that R. Augūnas never really distanced himself from traditions of Lithuanian photography, even when he travelled far away from Lithuania. The aim to reveal the essence of human nature in photographs, characteristic of R. Augūnas, inspired many other representatives of the Lithuanian photography school too. “Wherever Augūnas takes pictures – in foreign countries, in snowfields of the highest mountains or in his native village – he never transcends the space of Lithuanian photography” , – writes a photographer and historian of photography Stanislovas Žvirgždas. But when R. Augūnas takes pictures in Lithuania, the relation between his oeuvre and the Lithuanian photography school reveals itself not only through abstract humanistic content, but also through the choice of particular themes and subjects. The photographs published in the new album convince that R. Augūnas’ attention in his native land is attracted by the same things that are registered in the works of his colleagues. R. Augūnas photographs the town of Vilnius (Antanas Sutkus together with Romualdas Rakauskas, and Algimantas Kunčius published albums about Vilnius in the late sixties), markets that took place in the capital of Lithuania, (A. Macijauskas registered markets in various locations of Lithuania in one of his best photo series), relatives (Vitas Luckus was taking pictures of his relatives for almost three decades). The sight of R. Augūnas is directed towards Lithuanian countryside, small towns and life of local people. The author shows the peculiarities of this life by photographing the most diverse aspects of it: starting with funerals or the Hill of Crosses and ending with Soviet-time gatherings for collective work. Each of the above mentioned themes, moments of mundane life or celebrations seem to have equal importance in R. Augūnas’ oeuvre, and in this regard his look upon his native country is obviously different from that of his colleagues who developed a chosen theme in extensive cycles, often created throughout several decades. However, from a contemporary point of view, the diversity of R. Augūnas’ oeuvre may seem no less interesting than classical examples of Lithuanian photography that are marked with easily recognizable authorial touch of other artists.
One is convinced of this by R. Augūnas’ photographs, which make impression not for their expressive visual form, but for a strange feeling that is experienced when looking at old photographs. This unusual experience is delivered to a spectator not by aesthetics or technical quality of the photographs. On the contrary, the less “art” the photographs contain, the more intense is that almost irrational, a little awesome, but at the same time oddly pleasant feeling of overcoming the gap of time. The past intrudes into our present in the form of a photograph – an authentic imprint of reality. Thus, as an American writer Susan Sontag states, every photograph is a surreal “message from the past” . S. Valiulis pointed correctly that R. Augūnas’ photographs, which have registered life now sunk into the past, draw attention not only because of “nostalgia for past time and our own memory” . Even those readers who are too young to remember the reality registered in the photographs will recognize the above mentioned “messages from the past” in the new album, although they will perhaps not be able to read all its content. In this case simple nostalgia is replaced by much more profound feeling of breathing of the past, which we experience when we look, for example, at the photographs made by Eugene Atget in the beginning of the 20th century, although we have never seen Paris of those times immortalized in the pictures. In order to experience immediate relation with the past registered in the pictures, there is no need to comprehend visual information delivered by a photograph or to decipher the signs of the past period. Therefore many readers will experience direct encounter with the past when they have a look at R. Augūnas’ photographs in which one can see spectators at a horse race who do not even intuit the sight of a photographer who has noticed their emotions. Others may experience similar touch of the past while scrutinizing a photograph that registered a strange wooden house, which was seemingly already timeworn and abandoned when it was photographed by R. Augūnas. In a little blurry view, in a framing that does not conform to the clichés of a “good” composition, and in “incorrect” exposures of such pictures endure the moments of real life, which can be contained neither in rules of art photography, nor in other rationally constructed schemes.
Thus the new photo album gives an opportunity to discover different R. Augūnas’ oeuvre, which does not blind viewers with snowy mountain peaks and do not promise encounters with inhabitants of distant lands. This time a reader is given an occasion to open his eyes wide and to look not so much at the others and at the surrounding world, but at himself – Lithuanian photography, native land, its’ people and our past, which lingers on in the photographs.

Tomas Pabedinskas

“Speech is silver, but silence is golden”. This virtually universal adage, found across many different cultures, has long become a proverbial truth, dictating that wise silence is incomparably more valuable than oratory, rhetorical acrobatics, and speechmaking. Although the initial “habitat” of this truism was the everyday, domestic environment, its validity (and thus, also, power) is especially evident in the universe of “high” art. Most devout cinephiles will view a virtually silent Šarūnas Bartas, Kim Ki-duk or Andrei Tarkovsky film as indisputably more valuable (and spiritual) than, say, an American indie film with plenty of dialogues. For lovers of classical fine art photography, “Quiet” photographs of the Lithuanian maître Romualdas Rakauskas will always be superior to Nan Goldin’s raunchy, blatant shots.

Silence has a long history of adoration in the art context. From the sphere of professional art, this inclination to venerate and exaggerate silence has spilled over to the world of amateur “art” photography: it is easy to notice that great many young budding photographers who nurture artistic ambitions are convinced that the more “mute” and mysterious an image is, the better. An extreme manifestation of this trend is a photograph in which some poetic, enigmatic, or philosophical text is written, in a stylised form, on the body of the portrayed or on a sheet of paper that the latter holds in his or her hands; in this way, the portrayed remains “eloquently silent”.

Here’s the main paradox: as the latter example demonstrates, “artistic” silence still has some properties of speech – that is, far from “meaning nothing”, it has an immense semantic charge. Many connoisseurs of “serious” art believe that silence “says” more than words, because it leaves much more space for meaning. The usual, embodied word in this (modernist) system of thought is finite, constrained, skimpy, imperfect. Silence, on the contrary, is that Word which “was in the beginning”, incorporeal and thus potentially meaning Everything. Silence in modernist art – film, painting, and photography alike – is always transcendental and existential, overloaded with human (humanist) meanings.

It is a completely different story with post-modern art, in which – if only it is true to itself – “there is nothing outside the text”, according to Derrida’s famous maxim. Silence here is discursive and partial, and has a multitude of conflicting meanings, rather than all-encompassing transcendental meaning; it impudently intrudes into the very inside of speech and immediately self-destructs through irony. Here, it is usually not what it seems; fake gold, which shines not for the sake of deception, but rather to reveal that “real” gold is itself a fake.

The latter phrase perfectly describes Gytis Skudžinskas’ ongoing series Silence. Each abstract shot seems to depict the golden section – not the fabled one, which marks the perfect proportion between two parts of a whole, but another, a crack in “gold” itself, which designates the impossibility of “meaningful silence”. There is nothing beyond this line – this horizon, just as there is nothing outside the Derridian text. There is a fitting term for this in general relativity theory: event horizon. To put it simply, it is a boundary in spacetime beyond which events and processes cannot affect an outside observer – for instance, the sphere surrounding a black hole, from which no signals can reach us. The works of the Silence series depict visual silence as such an “event horizon” – there is nothing beyond it, and it is no use guessing what depths might lie there.

While colours “exceed” the limits of the canvas (that is to say, go “beyond the discourse”, to a mythical pre-language yet still existentially “meaningful” space) in, say, Mark Rothko’s typically modernist abstract paintings, which, incidentally, are often divided into two parts by a horizontal line as well, nothing of the sort happens in Gytis Skudžinskas’ abstract photographs, which, consciously or unconsciously, cite Rothko’s paintings. Here, colours have nowhere to go; and even if they can go somewhere beyond, we simply don’t have any tools to find out what awaits them there. In other words, we don’t have a space-suit that would enable us to survive, for any significant amount of time, in the space beyond the discourse, in complete, vacuum-like silence, in “the desert of the real”. That is why it feels somewhat uncomfortable to look at Gytis’ works, which resemble windows that open onto utter darkness. “Is this really photography? Or, perhaps, just playing around with the digital gradient fill tool?” – one might ask him- or herself.

Yet our eye, this so easily seduced and deceived organ, refuses to beliefe that it does not know what it is looking at, that this silence is devoid of any “human meaning” and hidden metaphors or mythological allusions. Trained by today’s excessive photographic culture, the eye desperately searches for familiar forms, and, unable to find them, looks for traces of transcendence and “silent revelations”. Numerous knights of art photography (both professionals and amateurs) know about this weakness of our eye (or mind) perfectly well, and keep eloquent silence in their work.

Gytis Skudžinskas, on the contrary, keeps silent in a way that makes the viewer’s eye eventually realize the sheer absurdity of looking for meaning in silence. He demonstrates that this instinctively chosen path is a dead-end. What he shows in his works is just silence. And nothing more.

Jurij Dobriakov. Golden Section