Lithuanian Photography Union published the new annual book "Lithuanian photography yesterday and today '10. Lithuanian visual heritage".




The Annual book was supported by Media Radio and TV support foundation with 80 thousand litas.

"From classical to modern photography - it is a visual palette of works by sixt Lithuanian photographers. The pages of the publication are permeated with love of our native land: Gediminas Castle, Vilnius Cathedral, the Hill of Three Crosses, Merkinė and Kernavė mounds, Trakai, the Nemunas, mists of Žemaitija, and a whole host of other places dear to our hearts...(A.Aleksandravičius)

Agnė Narušytė. The Visual Heritage of Lithuania

What is the visual heritage of Lithuania? Is it about inherited images that have a historical significance or about visual records of heritage? After having looked through the photographs selected for this volume, I see that both meanings are relevant: on the one hand, these are images of named places from which we recognise Lithuania; on the other hand, these are precisely images, the visions of the photographic eye in Lithuania.

The Timeless Image

Vilnius. The Hill of Crosses. Mounds. Churches. Trakai. The Sea. The Sagging Pier of Palanga. Trees – lonesome and in clumps. Šiauliai. Rivers – frozen and not. Countryside – Zervynos. A horse in the meadow. Cows. Stones dropped by the devil Pinčiukas, entangled by grass. Cemeteries with the portraits of people from the past. Kaunas. The Clouds – cumuli, cirri, and ‘zeppelin’ (this is a term invented by Gintautas Trimakas). Industrial pipes in sunset. The border – these are approximately objects of heritage recorded in photographs. It is enough to list them, and a stereotype narrative about Lithuania forms in one’s head, and any gaps in it are filled with stories of national revival, the longing for the sea that overcomes us every year and characters from literature I read at school: pregnant Veronica going to drown herself, Severiutė, picking mushrooms with passion, the priest Liudas Vasaris with his illegitimate love... They all still live in the same landscape, sometimes rippling with shadows, sometimes pacified by mist or snow.
A heritage that creates a basis for community has been represented in postcards and beautiful, colourful albums many times; it is sold every day to remind. Every day a multitude of images representing significant objects is imprinted in our memory. Images keep reminding, like transparent intermediaries, deleting themselves.
Photographs published in this volume restore the ‘materiality’ of the image. For example, the first one, a photograph by Paulius Lileikis: the object, a church, is visible only through a gap cut in the wall by a worker. The vantage point chosen for the image is at the wall: this is to create an obstacle, so that the eye would have to overcome the plane in the foreground. This choice can be also read politically: the beginning of the present time has been marked by the destruction of walls, not only walls of bricks, but also spiritual walls, hiding what was dear to people under the indifference of concrete. Then, the Castle of Gediminas photographed by Romanas Raulynaitis from above, reminding of a shoe sole, worn in some places; the silhouettes of churches cut by Julius Vaicekauskas from the mist covering Vilnius still in Soviet times; Trakai spotted from above in the vast emptiness of snow by Algimantas Aleksandravičius. Although such a bird’s eye-view (or, more precisely, plane’s) is no longer new or ‘avant-garde’, it still liberates from the limited perspective usual to the stroller: always at the feet, always at the wall, always looking up at the towers. By directing the gaze down to what is usually seen from bellow, by enveloping with the texture of mist and shedding commercial colours, photography draws attention to its image-nature. By thus materializing, it inscribes the object into memory better because it is singled out from the surroundings of uniform images, turned into a visual event.
Yet photographing from above, while trying to enfold the object of heritage with the image, creates a temporal distance. The eye observing from a respectable distance retreats also from everydayness, from things, people, streets, fallen leaves, cigarette butts and cars. In such photographs, all that is subject to change is moved to the indiscernible distance, hidden within the pattern on the ground created by the eye looking from above, the eye that evaluates everything from the perspective of cosmic time. Perhaps, this is why the visual heritage presented this way looks more eternal.

The Image of Impermanence

A photograph by Juozas Kazlauskas does not allow us to assign it to the category of heritage recorded for eternity, although it represents a place important for the history of the national liberation of Lithuania: the oak-wood of national revival in the birthplace of Jonas Basanavičius in Ožkabaliai (1997). I do not know why is that: is it because of the people, shrunk from wind, lined up in the distance of the grey field; or is it because of the rider riding out of the shot; or because of the oak in the foreground whose shredded leaves look as if forged from iron. I examine this seemingly simple reportage shot for a long while, but its strangeness does not go away, and the power of timeless objects supporting the national myth is torn by impermanence brought by the wind. The story about historical events stops here, hardly begun, melting in the meadow exhausted by autumn and in many details of the present that have recorded the inconsistencies of the moment.
Other images that have gone adrift from anything important also dismantle the narrative of history, for example, showy pavements written on by the sweeper or children at a simple hut photographed by Arūnas Kulikauskas with his pinhole camera probably placed on the ground.  In such photographs, we see not the object – not the oak-wood, not the pavements and not the hut (although they are there as well) – but the one who is looking. The place (s)he stands has been marked, the image is a record of his(her) physical body, and the camera is her(his) memory box. The accidental details of the present burst into such images and shatter them, like the wall of the first image by Lileikis. Here, two bunches of grass have intruded Kulikauskas’ photograph; one of the children is nearly out of frame, a flash of light crosses the layer of the image unrelated to reality photographed. If heritage is what we have to remember, this memory is too personal for everybody to agree on its value. The pinhole camera soaks insignificant images that are not worth remembering. By opening to anything, it accumulates nothing from the point of view of those in charge of national heritage; thus, it slowly approaches (but never catches up with) memory, to which images flow by themselves, incessantly, and where they remain unregistered. Only photography makes it possible to see them. But what for?

The Image of Imagination

Walter Benjamin said that Eugene Atget’s Paris reminds of crime scenes: Atget’s Paris is empty, photographed during the hours when everybody is still asleep. Then things can live: dummies in shop windows, a sculpture in the dormer, a conked wooden barrow. Things are like evidence to crime, a scene that has to be recorded by a police photographer; things found and not yet found: photography preserves the traces of crime better than landscape.
I remembered Atget’s Paris while looking at a Crimescape by Ugnius Gelguda published in this volume: it represents trees in the forest with knolls of snow lit by the lights of a car and the road diving into darkness. Gelguda finds similar landscapes in Lithuanian press; they accompany messages about crimes and are as empty as Atget’s Paris. Crime scenes, Benjamin would say, even without having read Lithuanian newspapers.
Why has my eye stopped at these crimescapes? They seem to be out of place in this volume because they do not contain any heritage. Even worse, no crime has been committed in this area because Gelguda has recreated them only as images. These are essentially empty images. The tunnel of light tears something out of darkness, but bangs into the wall of darkness again; it takes us nowhere and lets nobody in. This is a gaze that sees nothing, and if not the captions, telling about horrible crimes, my imagination would fill the darkness differently. Not with a crime, but with a journey of my childhood to somebody else’s country house situated at the end of the world: next to the Iron Curtain. The lights of the car slowly struggle through the forest; photography does not stop; neither does time.
Therefore, this image takes us where the spectator’s imagination tends to travel. Whatever it records, everything is just the product of simulation. What can be seen, is not what was, what is remembered. Although visible objects coincide with the image recorded in memory, they do not tell the same story. Crimescapes are an admission that the image is a myth, that it becomes heritage only when imagination knits a story out of its details.
The Image of the Eye?
The aforementioned pinhole technique, or photography through a hole the size of a pin, gets inserted into the flow of ‘normal’ photographs. It seems we see precisely this way: reality is sharper only where we look, and everything else dissolves in the mist of inattention. The images seen through the pin hole seem to thicken and melt. As if, they were touched by time. As if, after having found the image, one managed only to clear a window to the object in the centre: what is there? The manor of Užpaliai photographed by Mindaugas Česlikauskas, a conglomerate exposure, an Orthodox church and a river – all are the same representative signs of the landscape linking us all into a single present. Yet in these images, they have not yet come out of darkness completely, as if they were still in the process of being developed: this is how the photographic process is ‘thickened’ again. The vision of pinhole through darkness is a ‘poor’ visual memory, a heritage that threatens to disappear simply because it has not been saturated enough with light, that there was not enough time.
Yet images recorded with a pinhole camera should perform the role of disclosure in such an almanac of visual heritage. After all, if there is a true vision, they should reveal the artificiality of other images. But do they? Perhaps it is completely the opposite: we are so used to the equally sharp plane of the image (because the entire tradition of painting has accustomed us to it) that it represents true seeing to us. A pinhole photograph placed next to such images looks like incorrect vision, a strange thing found in the excavations of visual archaeology. It seems that pinhole is a recorded motion of lightening/darkening, suturing the image in the ambiguous zone between the invisible and the visible.

The Missing Image

When I heard of the subject of this almanac, ‘landscape’, which later turned into the ‘visual heritage of Lithuania’, I thought that to collect everything and define what is landscape in a single publication was a hopeless task. For example, I slip into Facebook and find new and new images by people I know and do not know (but who have become ‘friends’ in this space) every day. They all are memory. They all are images that talk. There is no longer any need of words; you send an image, and it says more in a single moment. And at the same time it says in the way that everybody can understand it the way they want. Here lies the beauty of talking in images, because they speak through pauses and hints.
This is how Remigijus Pačėsa also talks to everybody, by photographing something in Marijampolė where he now lives and by sharing it. The fog. The football field, the outer wood, puddles on the road, a tumbled rubbish bin, a rectangular shadow in the meadow, a mawkishly green wall of a block-of-flats with a glossy reflection… Marijampolė without landmarks: at least to me, because I do not know this town, these objects can be anywhere in Lithuania. This makes them painfully familiar; this is why they form a channel for communication, for telling, for example, about autumnal and now wintery states of mind. And yet these images record also a personal looking around characteristic only to Pačėsa who crops the image in a way that it seems to be incomplete at the start. His images cover rather than reveal, and reality is what has not been included into the shot.
I know I should not write about what is missing in this publication. Because many more things are missing than can be included. Because the book is only a fragment of the year, and the visual heritage in it is only a cutting of possible versions of Lithuania. One of many. Yet I write because images that are not here sometimes reveal what is here best: the turn of the understanding of photography, the formation of new canon, a personal view of the editor and many other things. The most interesting thing is, however, that despite all these considerations, it will seem eventually that what has been included here is most important today, now.

A Gap between Images

My thinking about what is missing has been prompted by Gintautas Trimakas whose project has undermined all images upholding Lithuanian heritage, like a kind of unconsciousness. Only three pairs of photographs: a significant object (the Cathedral, the Christmas tree at the Town Hall and the view of the old town from my balcony) and the camera recording that object. A large camera on a tripod, covered with a black cloth, is a light transforming apparatus that has intruded the present city from the past. The production of images is deconstructed by the fact that we cannot recognise the place where the camera stands. A different angle, even different aesthetics of photography (the massive columns of the Town Hall have led me to this thought). The black observer has its own space. It is impossible to connect the two images: they represent not the same place (not the same Lithuania), although the time of photographing, as far as I know, is the same, and the place in our consciousness is the same. For example, in everyday experience, a look at the Christmas tree from the columns of the Town Hall creates a unified space: through the intentionality of my eyes, through the movement of light flooding into them. Yet to the camera that obeys the photographer’s actions obediently, here and there are no longer connected. Even the movement of the eye and light to opposite directions has stopped in this photograph. Two shots, the photograph of the object and the photograph of the one who photographs, do not create a unified space in our consciousness. They rather pose an elementary, but at the same time treacherous, question: and where did the one who photographed the photographer stand? In order to answer, we would need a third photograph, but it would pose the same question again. Then we would need another, and another. And so on. To infinity.
Here you are: a book of images of Lithuania. The photographs collected here have complaisantly merged into the myth created by history long ago: Vilnius. The Hill of Crosses. Mounds. Churches. Trakai. The Sea. The Sagging Pier of Palanga. Trees – lonesome and in clumps. Šiauliai. Rivers – frozen and not. Countryside – Zervynos. A horse in the meadow. Cows. Stones dropped by the devil Pinčiukas, entangled by grass. Cemeteries with the portraits of people from the past. Kaunas. The Clouds... But the gaps created by Trimakas punch holes in this story. The doubts of missing images flood in through them.