124 Photographs and Several Objects

124 Photographs and Several Objects
from the Archive of Vincas Kisarauskas

Like his friends and colleagues, and other many Soviet-era artists, Vincas Kisarauskas was constantly taking photographs; but even though he was well aware of the importance of the photographic image, and wrote articles on photography, he used it mostly for documenting important events and decaying architectural and ethnographic monuments. Thus, he left a large number of negatives and slides after his death, which coincided with the end of the Soviet era. To open up or research an artist's papers is well-known as being an almost voyeuristic pleasure, which we can compare to reading a biographical novel, no matter how long and exhaustive it is. This exhibition is indeed a kind of biographical narrative, or even autobiographical, because the writer is Kisarauskas himself, who selected the people who were important to him, captured the events, and crafted his own image. My task as a publisher (or, in this case, as curator) has been to edit and publish 124 pages out of the author's 4,000-page draft. Therefore, I obviously had to edit out a lot. For instance, I had to leave the pictures of gravestones, roadside shrines and other ethnographic objects, which comprise a substantial part of Kisarauskas' papers, for some time in the future; and instead to include more photographs of prominent personalities from his times. In addition, I sought to convey the artist's everyday life, by exhibiting family photographs and information from his journeys, up to his very last visit to the USA, where he passed away on 27 October 1988. Although all biographies end with the protagonist's death, I would like to conclude this introduction differently, as I believe that the power of photography enables us to get a glimpse of life in the past, if only a very narrow one, through the aperture of a camera.

Curator Aistė Kisarauskaitė

Sponsors: Culture Council of Lithuania, Culture Ministry of the Republic of Lithuania, VšĮ Pirmoji kava, Exterus, Ekspobalta
Media support: Lietuvos rytas, lrytas.lt