Thinking about the previous editions of the Debiutas [Debut] competition, I can’t help but feel disappointed that so many talented artists who took part or even won later vanished into other activities, apparently forgetting about the photographic quests they once cherished. However, there are also those who began careers with Debiutas and who we now call known artists – Virgilijus Šonta, Romualdas Požersis, Vytautas Balčytis, Raimondas Paknys, Violeta Bubelytė, Algirdas Šeškus, Gintautas Trimakas, Vytautas Stanionis, Aleksandras Ostašenkovas, Alfonsas Budvytis, Vilma Samulionytė and others.

Seven exhibitions of young photographers were organised from 1975 to 1988, and the idea was rekindled in 2010, whereas 2017 saw the event go international. So the photographers who make it to the finals know that Debiutas can definitely be a starting point rather than an endpoint. This competition begs to be called a military training ground for launching rockets – it’s a destination to test out new strategies, and to perfect already discovered ones by providing them with fresh forms to take over the endless cosmos of visual art.

The last decade has seen technology take off at an incredible pace, flooding us with endless waves of images, so photography had to face the inevitable, essential, most relevant questions of survival. The same happened to painting a while back, although the reasons for that were completely different. What else could be done with this irrational abundance of selfies, miscellaneous filters used on retouched travel photos and images created by glamour bloggers?

This time, Debiutas tries to reflect on the directions photography might go in, to overcome this excess: fictitious explorations of cosmic travels; the showy documentation of the past’s architectural ruins or the stories of witnesses still alive; the breath of the cold north, and loneliness; taking pictures in the dark; pedantic art research about some small detail like feathers; visualised feministic and ecological declarations; examining private and collective memories through archival photos; returning to the period before analogue photography; a forever young and rebellious collage.

But didn’t the famous Paris Salon of the 19th century or the exhibitions of London’s Royal Academy of Arts seem like they were taking similar directions too back then? These were the most prestigious annual exhibitions organised by respected institutions. And they had a variety of genres – still-life paintings, Biblical subjects, dramatic battles, the doom of Pompeii, calm pastoral landscapes and portraits of beautiful women.

Perhaps every epoch has its genres and art categories, with people like Joseph Mallord William Turner having to get involved to turn a simple marine landscape into something that one of the Debiutas artists, Gabrielė Vingraitė, referred to as heterotopia in her theoretical article. Heterotopia might be used to describe an original space that an artist creates – this space doesn’t follow the typical laws of everyday life that we understand. It could be the flatness of a painting, or space junk flying in the dark cosmos, or maybe a private landscape through a window.

Debiutas gradually became a prestigious contest, an opportunity to share one’s space with others, and to enter others’ spaces. Spaces that burst out of the frame of a single country; spaces that cannot be described only by talking about one technique. Spaces that are only linked with each other via the universe of photographic media.

And that universe may not be made up of real objects or facts. The main thing here is to keep creating it. Even the phrases “space junk” or “cosmic trash” can switch on the imagination. While talking about conspiracy theories, newly publicised information, or Man’s journey to the Moon, our imagination runs even wilder, creating its own versions of colonising outer space. The “research” SDIT-1 (Space Debris Investigation Trip – 1) by Tobias Asser is by no means a disappointing project, even though intentional scanner errors or roughly pixelated poor-quality photos have become something of a cliché. Tobias plays on clichés like this, reinventing a reality that’s very persuasive – focusing not on past events or on conquering space but rather on the work of our imagination.

Some artists at this year’s Debiutas concentrate on splinters of the past, and that’s not at all surprising – historicism is still a trendy direction. Explorations of collective memory, old photos and outdated photographic technology – like the wet-collodion technique used by Emilija Petrauskienė in her series Silver Garden – have been seen many times, yet we have to admit that it all just looks beautiful.

This beauty of the ruins of the past and the professionalism of photographic techniques is evident too in Luana Rigolli’s documental research In Aqua Salus. Archival images and links between the past and the present bring life to Claudia Corrent’s project For You, To Remember Her Often. Taking a glance at the list of the latter artist’s awards can make you a believer not only in her project but also in the fact that her photographic strategy is now a powerful trend. Still, when discussing things like cataclysms and totalitarian experiences of the 20th century, one has to look for interesting human connections to past events. And Claudia does that convincingly.

If photography is trying to reflect our times, the ecological aspect should be at the centre of attention. This time, Matylda Awdziejczyk discovers the common plastic bag instead of something like cosmic junk. It’s all good – recycling is important work as well, and even a company like Nike is making shoes from recycled plastic, so photography can’t hide from this trend forever. It can’t avoid feminist discourses either, especially like the ones in the photographs of Albina Galeeva, which are dedicated to her mother (Photos for Mom) – or rather are dedicated to questioning the patriarchal principles of older generations.

If you’re in search of something fresh, I’d suggest giving Artūras Jendovickis’ series Privatus miesto peizažas (Private City Landscape) a chance. It might look like a trend-chasing affair at first, but there is certainly something very private and profound about it. The larger-scale project by Gabrielė Vingraitė was among the masters’ final works at the academy last year, but this smaller version truly deserves to be called heterotopia, although the observer is already deeply affected without the need to use any accurate terminology. The artist notes that “every tree that’s photographed is a particular symbol of solitude, archaic elements and timelessness, and an endless emptiness opens up within it”.

Ines Marinho faces a similar state of solitude in her series When a Ship Goes By. Clean, perfectly executed artistic research has become academic and aesthetic, just like Sheng-Wen Lo’s project Down – a reflection on down jackets and their feathers.

Finally, Ewa Doroszenko demonstrates probably the most intimidating register of exhibitions and prizes with the odd (which is already great – oddities are becoming rarer in the vast flow of today’s photography) visual collage series Body Editor. The project involves the traditions of Dada collages, hints at American pop-art gods like James Rosenquist, points out the mistakes of contemporary apps, and all those waterfalls of modern visual spam lurking for us behind the screens or in outdoor ads. We could state that photography keeps calmly documenting the problems of its own fate, presenting it all in such an aesthetic way that the observers regain their pleasure.

And this not only applies to Ewa’s works but to the whole Debiutas competition – there’s loads of visual pleasure, publicised social problems, playful imaginations and emotional stories here. I believe this military training zone for various strategies will become a launch-pad for many artists, and those projects that have already been tested can check if they still meet the requirements of proper discoveries. I hope these explorations of photography’s cosmos continue to be more and more successful in the future.

Photo by Tobias Asser