Virginijus Kinčinaitis (born 1965) is an art researcher, critic, and lecturer. He graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts’ Institute of Art Research in 1999 as an art historian and theoretician. V. Kinčinaitis is an active member of the art society and of the applied arts research activities, having initiated and implemented over 60 international, national and Šiauliai-specific creative/artistic projects, participated in more than 20 international and local art projects and exhibitions. He published a few hundred theoretical and critical articles (also many on culture studies), three monographs: “Interpretacijos: postmodernizmas, vizualinė kultūra, dailė” [“Interpretations: postmodernism, visual culture, art”]. Šiauliai: Saulės delta 2001; “Vizualinės kultūros kon/tekstai” [“Con/texts of visual culture”]. Šiauliai: Saulės delta, 2007; “Fotoregos pratimai” [“Exercises for photo vision”]. Vilnius: Lietuvos fotomenininkų sąjungos leidykla, 2014. V. Kinčinaitis is the compiler of several publications, and has been working as the vice principal at Šiauliai Art Gallery since 1992, giving lectures at the Telšiai faculty of Vilnius Academy of Arts since 2010. In 2017 he became a member of the board of the Lithuanian culture ministry and the Lithuanian council for culture, receiving the Lithuanian Republic Government Culture and Art Award in 2016.
Crisis of truth in the world of fakeness
After the famous manipulations of documentary photography at the end of the 20th century, the trust in the photographic image received a hard blow. Today, any kind of picture is firstly questioned for its authenticity, it’s no longer the kind of unconditional proof of reality that it used to be in the humanist photojournalism in the beginning of the last century. The mass media consumer understands that an image is not a trace of the real world anymore – it’s barely a rhetoric figure in a political, economic, religious or cultural fight. This is how the visual traits of documentary photography become similar to the ones of fashion or advertising, where aesthetic or ideological motifs triumph over the longing for reality and justice. On the other hand, we could ask ourselves whether a period of early photography that was ideal and free from sly motives ever actually existed. The legendary Parisian photo studio of Nadar had up to 26 helpers working for him, six of which were doing the retouching. This was a time when the most expensive and popular photo studios used the methods of beautifying images to the maximum. The lecture will explore this combination of fashion, art and documentary image in the historic perspective, along with the ethical and aesthetic consequences of it all.
