Backstage. Conversation with photographer Simon Chang
2026 09 11 / Marija Martinaitytė
At the end of May, with photographer Simon Chang, while his stay in Nida was coming to an end, I talked about the specificity of Nida, time that always passes too fast, constant change, and photography as a way to slowly observe. “Once you expose yourself to pure nature like this, you pick up those missing abilities, and become more sensitive in a way. It’s a really nice feeling, not only as a photographer but as a person too.”
Depicting the Undepictable
2025 11 25 / Žilvinė Gaižutytė-Filipavičienė | "Photography" No. 1 (45), 2025
How can we depict and narrate what human beings cannot fully imagine? This question was raised by Amitav Ghosh in his well-known 2016 book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.[1] The Indian writer called the current transformations of Earth and humanity – global climate change caused by anthropogenic activity – a phenomenon so vast in scale that traditional thinking deranges and the cultural imagination becomes incapable of grasping it. So the primary question of Anthropocene aesthetics concerns what can be imagined and what can be represented.
How to Predict ‘Terrifying Weather’ (or Deadly Nature Metaphors)
2025 11 15 / Skaidra Trilupaitytė | "Photography" No. 1 (45), 2025
This text was inspired by images of natural disasters captured under risky conditions in several 2025 documentary films – 'The Twister: Caught in the Storm', directed by Alexandra Lacey, and the multi-part documentary 'Katrina: Come Hell and High Water' by Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles, and Spike Lee. The first tells the story of how, in May 2011, a natural force destroyed the town of Joplin, Missouri. Fragments of authentic footage (as many witnesses at that time increasingly recorded their surroundings with smartphones) help recall the story of how recent high school graduates, moments after their commencement, survived a tornado of rare strength – nicknamed ‘the monster’ – and its tragic aftermath.
(u n) fi xing
2025 11 06 / Paulius Petraitis | "Photography" No. 1 (45), 2025
Photography was born from a paradox: a desire to make permanent what is most impermanent. It is a technology conceived out of a scientific and cultural desire to arrest time itself: the fleeting reflection, the transient play of light, the momentary alignment of forms in the world. This foundational quest for fixity was inscribed into the medium’s public identity from its inception. In 1839, one of photography’s founders William Henry Fox Talbot enthused: “The most transitory of things, a shadow... may be fixed forever”. The same year, the statesman François Arago introduced the new apparatus not as an art form but as a scientific instrument, a peer to the thermometer and the barometer. This framing was profound. It conditioned the public to believe that the camera was an objective tool of inscription, that it “does not interpret. It records.”
Gliding over Glaciers with Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė
2025 10 30 / Agnė Narušytė | "Photography" No. 1 (45), 2025
Melting glaciers are perhaps the most iconic image of climate change. Glaciers, where human survival is difficult, are the habitus of polar bears, an ecosystem suited to them, as they hunt while walking on the ice. As the ice melts, bears have to go hunting farther and farther from the shore, and food becomes unattainable. Images of emaciated polar bears were broadcast on television a quarter of a century ago in an attempt to warn humankind, too preoccupied with depleting Earth’s riches. The suffering polar bear seemed to testify that, as the climate changed, comfortable human life would also come to an end.
Planetary thinking
2025 10 25 / Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė | "Photography" No. 1 (45), 2025
Our relationship with the planet and how we visually perceive it has changed since the first photographs of Earth taken from space. Seen from afar, the planet became a manipulable artefact: a technological system, a spaceship, resources, models, and engineering projects. Remote observation is also inseparable from attempts to calculate the scale of the climate crisis and to analyse the impact of anthropogenic activity on ecosystems. The natural world, its fragile states, and the consequences of alarming natural forces are often perceived from a distance – through screens, simulations, and sensors that convert natural processes into data and circulating images, shaping our perception of the environment.
Notes on Fossils, Ruins and Difficult Objects
2024 12 27 / Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė
The exhibition ‘Form as Function’, curated by Paulius Petraitis, presents a group of Estonian artists, Paul Kuimet, Kristina Õllek and Ruudu Ulas, who approach photography as a form of dialogue between materiality and conceptual exploration. In these artists’ photographic practices, we encounter the concept of form as an active element, integral to the making of meaning. As we move through the gallery space, we are invited to re-imagine photography as a medium that allows us not only to see the world, but also to interact with it critically and materially, moving through the folds of the surface image, where thought and matter come together to form a concept, a shape, or a feeling.
An interview with Ieva Maslinskaitė
2024 09 03 / by Marija Martinaitytė
The ecological crisis is a looming problem that permeates everything and is also echoed in contemporary art. We are seeing a lot of exhibitions, works, and projects that address the ecological crisis in some way or seek possible solutions. Very often they are representational, especially in photography, because it is, of course, inseparable from representation. But this raises the question of how we represent nonhuman others and the environment.
How to Create a Community: An Interview with Jonas Staselis
2019 12 17
The 50th anniversary of the Lithuanian Photographers Association is a perfect occasion for us to talk with those who contributed to its establishment and development. Jonas Staselis is a former Chair of the Association and we talk about various aspects of its work.
How to Survive Through the Hardships: An Interview with Stanislovas Žvirgždas
2019 12 17
The 50th anniversary of the Lithuanian Photographers Association is a perfect occasion for us to talk with those who contributed to its establishment and development. This is our conversation with Stanislovas Žvirgždas, photographer and former chair of the Association (1992–1996).
