Memorabilia: Julius Sasnauskas’ Theory of Photography
Since 2019, Julius Sasnauskas has been publishing essays in his column “Memorabilia” in Šiaurės Atėnai, where images form an integral part of the text. These might include everyday ephemera – a discarded bus ticket or a three-ruble note – as well as documents from personal (a handwritten prayer booklet) or public (a KGB search protocol) archives, posters, postcards, or religious pictures. Many of the photographs relate to church life, alongside other everyday scenes or portraits. Most of the images that appear in these essays are anonymous. In photography theory, the anonymity of an image is one source of unease regarding its interpretation. Siegfried Kracauer warned that the meaning of a photograph is in danger of withering into a nameless collection of old-fashioned styles, and Annette Kuhn, writing about family photographs, noted that an untold family photo remains silent – "a prop, a hint, a pretext.” Julius Sasnauskas embraces anonymity as an inherent characteristic of an image, one that does not obstruct the telling of its story but, on the contrary, opens up hermeneutic possibilities. In other words, he curates anonymity in his own way. This form of curating anonymity is the focus of my lecture.
Natalija Arlauskaitė is a researcher of visuality and cinema and a professor at the Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science. Her main areas of interest are visual and media theory, the historical imagination, Soviet studies, World War II memory, and medical imagery. Her books include A Brief Handbook of Feminist Film Theory (2010), Olymp of Us and Others: Screenings Between Narrative Theory and Cultural Criticism (2014), Fierce Peace: the Photography of Collapsed Regimes in Documentary Cinema (2020, all published by Vilnius University Press). Together with Lina Kaminskaitė, she co-authored In Focus: Women in Lithuanian Cinema (Lapas, 2021). Together with Miglė Anušauskaitė she co-authored To Look and to be Looked at: comics and terms of feminist film theory (Lapas, 2023).
