Antanas Sutkus
Lithuanian photographer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Antanas Sutkus (born 27 June 1939) is a Lithuanian photographer.[1]
Sutkus is a recipient of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts, the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas,[2] and the Dr. Erich Salomon Award.[3] He was one of the co-founders and a president of the Lithuanian Association of Art Photographers (Lithuanian: Lietuvos fotografijos meno draugija).[4]
Life and work
Sutkus was born on 27 June 1939 in Kluoniškiai, Kaunas district, Lithuania.
He studied journalism at Vilnius University in the late 1950s; at the time the Lithuanian SSR[4] was part of the Soviet Union. He became disillusioned by the confines of the Soviet-controlled press and began taking photographs, wanting to find a way to make his camera "a weapon for the underground" in portraying resistance to the USSR.[5]
Sutkus concentrated on black and white portraits of ordinary people in their everyday life rather than the model citizens and workers promoted by Soviet propaganda.[6][1] He photographed children, who represented a kind of freedom: "Children have a world with its own laws, rules, its own happiness and sadness. To enter it, you need to feel that you are a kid. Adults and children are different stories."[5] A series of mid-1960s portraits of children, often with adults in the shot pointedly faceless and irrelevant, was collected in a 2020 book. He took a photograph that became famous of a communist "Young Pioneer" boy with shaven head and very sad expression which got him called before the central committee and denounced as "photography's Solzhenitsyn".[5]
He co-founded the Lithuanian Association of Art Photographers in 1969.[1] He is well known for his life-long survey, People of Lithuania,[1] begun in 1976 to document the changing life and people of the Lithuanian SSR.[4]
Sutkus had an opportunity to spend time with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1965 when they visited Lithuania. One image, taken against the white sand of Nida, is highly regarded as capturing Sartre's ideas.[7]
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Publications
- Neringa. Vilnius: Mintis, 1982. OCLC 11114726. Text in English, German, Lithuanian, and Russian.
- Lietuva = Lithuaniua. Vilnius: Lietuvos Fotomeninink Sąjungos Fondas, 1992. OCLC 442398420. Edited and with a text by Alfred Bumblauskas.
- Antanas Sutkus: Fotografijos: 1959-1999 = Antanas Sutkus: Photographs: 1959-1999. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2000. ISBN 9789955000242.
- Retrospektyva = Retrospective. Vilnius: Sapna Sala, 2009. ISBN 9789955611417.
- Lithuanian Portraits. With a text by Nadim Julien Samman. Accompanied an exhibition at White Space Gallery, London, and Signs of Time Gallery, Moscow.[8]
- People of Lithuania. Kaunas, Lithuania: Kaunas Photography Gallery; Lithuanian Photographer's Association, 2015. ISBN 9786098099096. With a preface by William A. Ewing and an essay by Margarita Matulytė. Edited by Gintaras Česonis in cooperation with Ewing, Jean-Marc Lacabe and Margarita Matulytė.
- In Memoriam. London: White Space Gallery, 2016. With a text by Alfonsas Bukontas.
- Sutkus, Antanas (2020). Children. Göttingen: Steidl GmbH & Co. OHG. ISBN 978-3-95829-709-8. OCLC 1135366689.
Awards
Exhibitions
- Un Regard Libre, Le château d’eau, pôle photographique de Toulouse, Toulouse, France, March–April 2011.[9]
- Nostalgia for Bare Feet, The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography, Moscow, April–May 2016.[1][10]