VILNIUS — While recently studying for a master’s degree in photojournalism and documentary photography I was shocked to discover when learning the history of the two genres that photography behind the Iron Curtain wasn’t discussed.

What appears to be unacceptable to Western thought is that every photojournalist and documentary photographer working behind the Iron Curtain between 1922 and 1991 worked under regimes of strangulating propaganda, thus making null and void their work.

But surely the fact that he was operating under a [private_supervisor]totalitarian regime doesn’t negate the artistic merit of the Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus, a photographer whose work, in the words of the online arts and culture magazine Culture Kiosk, “bears witness to the country’s subjection to Soviet rule, presenting a visual history of communism in an objective but humanistic documentary style.”

Seventy this year, Antanas Sutkus is an interesting and controversial character worth checking out. Fêted by both the Soviet authorities and the mass of ordinary (predominantly anti-Soviet) people of Lithuania during his professional working life, he produced an enormous body of work, much of it in “collaboration” with the Soviet authorities. What he also did is record on his 35mm camera literally hundreds of thousands of beautiful black and white photographs of the commonplace lives lived by the vast majority of ordinary people during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, a collection that could easily have won him a free trip to Siberia and that consequently stayed hidden away in boxes until Lithuanian independence in 1990.

Antanas Sutkus was born into a peasant family on June 26, 1939 in the tiny village of Kluoniškiai, about 20 km west of Kaunas. In November 1940 Sutkus’ father, a peat-cutter with leftist sympathies, was forced to sign documents sentencing a number of locals into Siberian exile. When he refused, the Soviets threatened to send the Sutkus family to Siberia, a fate Antanas’ father chose to solve by committing suicide. His mother remarried soon after, only to meet a similar fate when, after being drafted into the Wehrmacht after the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941 Antanas’ father-in-law refused to participate in the murder of local Jews and was taken away by the Gestapo never to be seen again. Sutkus’ mother fled to the West, leaving a young Antanas to be brought up by his grandparents.

Although what he really wanted was a radio or a bicycle, his family’s poor economic circumstances meant that a camera was all that could be afforded, an incident that in the long run was a benefit to everyone. Antanas Suktus’ reason behind exactly why he chose a camera was a typical one. It was a good way to meet girls,  of whom several became subjects for his first portraits along with scenes of the local peat-cutters who worked in the fields around the village.

In 1958, by now never to be seen without his trademark Zenit 35mm camera, Sutkus began studying at Vilnius University, first reading Russian Language and Literature before switching to a journalism course although this was strictly forbidden without two years’ prior journalism experience. His obsession with photography however grew to such an extent that in his own words he ‘drowned’ in it, neglecting his studies and finally leaving university without a degree after six years of drifting.

Through his ever-growing network of connections Sutkus was already getting regular work for several publications, among them the weekly Literature ir Menas (Literature and Art), an engagement that would lead to the most famous incident in a life punctuated with many colorful events.

A record of life in the “Second World”

During the 1960s, usually in the countryside away from the prying eyes of the KGB, Antanas Sutkus photographed the ordinary people of Lithuania whenever he could, always with his Zenit camera.

As a practicing artist with excellent credentials, the photographer enjoyed a relatively lucrative career as did all artists in favor with the authorities, meaning he could photograph as much as he wanted just so long as he was careful. His personal photographic project that eventually grew into the massive “Lietuvos Žmonės” (Lithuanian People) series stands as the only substantial professional body of work reflecting a non-Homo Sovieticus outlook in Lithuania, if not the entire Soviet Union.

It’s more than worth noting that access to the work of Western photographers was extremely limited during the early part of his career. Sutkus’ style, which at times has been likened to Henri Cartier-Bresson, grew out of an intuitive eye rather than through the inspiration of others.

There are two well-known photographs of Pioneers taken by Sutkus, one of a blind Pioneer taken in 1962 and the other, from 1964, of a Pioneer with a distinctively unhappy face. The latter won a Michelangelo Gold Prize after it was entered in an Italian competition on 1970 and was subsequently published in the pan-Soviet magazine Sovietskai Foto. Its publication created uproar, with Sutkus being called the “Lithuanian Solzhenitsyn” for his betrayal and for its likeness of what appeared to many to be a concentration camp setting. Pioneers were expected to smile for the camera, it was as simple as that. There were even demands for the photographer’s imprisonment. It’s hard to comprehend such attitudes, but this was the reality of life in the Soviet Union. going a long way towards explaining the importance of his “Lietuvos Žmonės” project.

Much of Antanas Sutkus’ work appears innocuous to a Western viewer, but the reality is very different indeed. Policing photography was a full time job. Soon after it started, the Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers opened a gallery in Vilnius. Margarita Paskevičiutė, an expert on photography and Soviet censorship, worked for the Union for almost two decades and tells many stories of the KGB turning up before exhibitions were due to open and removing offensive photographs from the walls. She famously carried a sign in her pocket that read “Closed for Technical Reasons” that she would put on the gallery entrance when the gaps between the pictures got too big.

Whilst Antanas Sutkus was secretly creating a unique and historically important collection of photographs he was also working for the authorities. He was the first photographer in the Soviet Union to publish a book of photographs taken from the air, “Lietuva iš Paukščio Skrydžio” (A Bird’s Eye View of Lithuania, 1980), published in a first edition of a staggering 200,000 copies and printed on state of the art equipment in Hungary. The book graced thousands of bookshelves throughout the Soviet Union and is a testament to Suktus’ mainstream popularity.

Amusingly, one of his most well-known photographs, that remained hidden away from view until 1990, shows a rebellious-looking young man in an open shirt and sunglasses sitting on a bus with a KGB officer sitting immediately behind him. The photograph was taken during production of the book. The young man is the helicopter pilot who flew Sutkus on the photographic trips. The KGB officer was assigned to them, his job being to sit in the air traffic control tower and watch the radar to make sure neither of them defected.

Can you call him a collaborator?

Both types of Sutkus’ photography — his work publicly-sanctioned by Soviet authorities, and his private work — were approached in the same way, that is from the soul, and executed with an eye for producing a style of work that hadn’t been done before. Although forced to join the Communist Party in the 1974 under threat of closure of the Union, Antanas Sutkus always considered himself to be an artist, only later realizing the importance of his private work outside of the world of art. Although maintaining friendly relations with the communist authorities there are few Sutkus photographs of model workers or large military parades. The “Lithuanian People” project was never planned, coming from a spontaneous feeling. When he began looking through his private collection, he saw only people. His life was dedicated to communicating with people and taking photographs.

Sutkus’ last major independent project during Soviet times started in 1988 in the midst of massive changes throughout the Soviet Union. Glastnost brought a wave of activities hitherto unheard of, with mass protests and memorials taking place on an increasingly regular basis. One afternoon the photographer was invited to a gathering of Holocaust survivors from Kaunas at the Ninth Fort, one of the main locations of mass murders in Lithuania during the Holocaust. Under Soviet occupation the Holocaust was officially labeled an atrocity against the Soviet people. There was never any talk of a specifically Jewish Holocaust. Sutkus, who’d always been interested in Jewish culture, began photographing survivors from the Kaunas (Kovno) Ghetto, learning through conversations the truth about what happened in Lithuania between 1941 and 1944. The photographs became a book, “Pro Memoria,” published in 1997.

It’s typical of the complexities and contradictions of the human condition in general and the human condition in the Soviet Union in particular that Antanas Sutkus managed to produce an extraordinary body of work that, if discovered, could have cost him his freedom whilst at the same time he was drinking with Communist Party leaders and gaining favor with representatives of an oppressive occupying regime. The word “collaborator” has been used to describe him, although of course collaboration was a daily event in the lives of most people living behind the Iron Curtain.

At 70, Antanas Sutkus isn’t in good shape. A chronic smoker, recurring heart problems have led to more than one close shave with death. Ironically, one of his closest contemporary friends, the Franciscan priest and writer Julius Sasnauskas spend several years in prison under the Soviets for his beliefs.

Looking at Sutkus’ work there’s a clear distinction between the photographs he took during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania and those he took after independence. I was intrigued about this and asked him if he saw or felt any change in his work during this period of transition. He was adamant that art doesn’t change with a change of the ideological conditions it’s created under. Tellingly perhaps, the usually confident and talkative photographer took an awfully long time to answer this question. Antanas Sutkus gave up taking photographs completely in 2005 partly he says for health reasons and partly because people are no longer interesting to him.

“There are not such pure people any more. One has to love people to take pictures of them,” Sutkus told Baltic Reports.

The recipient of numerous awards including high-ranking communist ones as well as post-independence recognitions of his work for Lithuania, Antanas Sutkus spends his retirement going through his negatives, creating an archive with the help of a recent grant from the Hasselblad Foundation.

Although it can be argued that Sutkus’ photography was sometimes not quite as technically good as the work of several of his contemporaries, where he stands alone as an exceptional photographer of immense historical importance is in the sheer amount of images he took over an extended period of time and on a subject of which there’s absolutely nothing to compare. It’s an interesting fact that his work hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where historically Sutkus’ work is recognized for its historical importance, and yet, in the world of documentary photography, he remains virtually undiscovered.

If photography should be dismissed in serious academic circles on the grounds of its connections with propaganda, there really would be very little photography left.

Sutkus influenced my work because we’re both interested in ordinary people plus we also both have an anarchic, mischeivious streak. In particular I’ve been influenced by his Kasdienybės Archyvai (Daily Life Archives) project, which was kept locked away until independence.

Sutkus’ photography books are widely available in Lithuanian bookstores and make a great addition to your coffee table.

— Baltic Reports editor Nathan Greenhalgh contributed to this article.
[/private_supervisor] [private_subscription 1 month]totalitarian regime doesn’t negate the artistic merit of the Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus, a photographer whose work, in the words of the online arts and culture magazine Culture Kiosk, “bears witness to the country’s subjection to Soviet rule, presenting a visual history of communism in an objective but humanistic documentary style.”

Seventy this year, Antanas Sutkus is an interesting and controversial character worth checking out. Fêted by both the Soviet authorities and the mass of ordinary (predominantly anti-Soviet) people of Lithuania during his professional working life, he produced an enormous body of work, much of it in “collaboration” with the Soviet authorities. What he also did is record on his 35mm camera literally hundreds of thousands of beautiful black and white photographs of the commonplace lives lived by the vast majority of ordinary people during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, a collection that could easily have won him a free trip to Siberia and that consequently stayed hidden away in boxes until Lithuanian independence in 1990.

Antanas Sutkus was born into a peasant family on June 26, 1939 in the tiny village of Kluoniškiai, about 20 km west of Kaunas. In November 1940 Sutkus’ father, a peat-cutter with leftist sympathies, was forced to sign documents sentencing a number of locals into Siberian exile. When he refused, the Soviets threatened to send the Sutkus family to Siberia, a fate Antanas’ father chose to solve by committing suicide. His mother remarried soon after, only to meet a similar fate when, after being drafted into the Wehrmacht after the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941 Antanas’ father-in-law refused to participate in the murder of local Jews and was taken away by the Gestapo never to be seen again. Sutkus’ mother fled to the West, leaving a young Antanas to be brought up by his grandparents.

Although what he really wanted was a radio or a bicycle, his family’s poor economic circumstances meant that a camera was all that could be afforded, an incident that in the long run was a benefit to everyone. Antanas Suktus’ reason behind exactly why he chose a camera was a typical one. It was a good way to meet girls, of whom several became subjects for his first portraits along with scenes of the local peat-cutters who worked in the fields around the village.

In 1958, by now never to be seen without his trademark Zenit 35mm camera, Sutkus began studying at Vilnius University, first reading Russian Language and Literature before switching to a journalism course although this was strictly forbidden without two years’ prior journalism experience. His obsession with photography however grew to such an extent that in his own words he ‘drowned’ in it, neglecting his studies and finally leaving university without a degree after six years of drifting.

Through his ever-growing network of connections Sutkus was already getting regular work for several publications, among them the weekly Literature ir Menas (Literature and Art), an engagement that would lead to the most famous incident in a life punctuated with many colorful events.

A record of life in the “Second World”

During the 1960s, usually in the countryside away from the prying eyes of the KGB, Antanas Sutkus photographed the ordinary people of Lithuania whenever he could, always with his Zenit camera.

As a practicing artist with excellent credentials, the photographer enjoyed a relatively lucrative career as did all artists in favor with the authorities, meaning he could photograph as much as he wanted just so long as he was careful. His personal photographic project that eventually grew into the massive “Lietuvos Žmonės” (Lithuanian People) series stands as the only substantial professional body of work reflecting a non-Homo Sovieticus outlook in Lithuania, if not the entire Soviet Union.

It’s more than worth noting that access to the work of Western photographers was extremely limited during the early part of his career. Sutkus’ style, which at times has been likened to Henri Cartier-Bresson, grew out of an intuitive eye rather than through the inspiration of others.

There are two well-known photographs of Pioneers taken by Sutkus, one of a blind Pioneer taken in 1962 and the other, from 1964, of a Pioneer with a distinctively unhappy face. The latter won a Michelangelo Gold Prize after it was entered in an Italian competition on 1970 and was subsequently published in the pan-Soviet magazine Sovietskai Foto. Its publication created uproar, with Sutkus being called the “Lithuanian Solzhenitsyn” for his betrayal and for its likeness of what appeared to many to be a concentration camp setting. Pioneers were expected to smile for the camera, it was as simple as that. There were even demands for the photographer’s imprisonment. It’s hard to comprehend such attitudes, but this was the reality of life in the Soviet Union. going a long way towards explaining the importance of his “Lietuvos Žmonės” project.

Much of Antanas Sutkus’ work appears innocuous to a Western viewer, but the reality is very different indeed. Policing photography was a full time job. Soon after it started, the Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers opened a gallery in Vilnius. Margarita Paskevičiutė, an expert on photography and Soviet censorship, worked for the Union for almost two decades and tells many stories of the KGB turning up before exhibitions were due to open and removing offensive photographs from the walls. She famously carried a sign in her pocket that read “Closed for Technical Reasons” that she would put on the gallery entrance when the gaps between the pictures got too big.

Whilst Antanas Sutkus was secretly creating a unique and historically important collection of photographs he was also working for the authorities. He was the first photographer in the Soviet Union to publish a book of photographs taken from the air, “Lietuva iš Paukščio Skrydžio” (A Bird’s Eye View of Lithuania, 1980), published in a first edition of a staggering 200,000 copies and printed on state of the art equipment in Hungary. The book graced thousands of bookshelves throughout the Soviet Union and is a testament to Suktus’ mainstream popularity.

Amusingly, one of his most well-known photographs, that remained hidden away from view until 1990, shows a rebellious-looking young man in an open shirt and sunglasses sitting on a bus with a KGB officer sitting immediately behind him. The photograph was taken during production of the book. The young man is the helicopter pilot who flew Sutkus on the photographic trips. The KGB officer was assigned to them, his job being to sit in the air traffic control tower and watch the radar to make sure neither of them defected.

Can you call him a collaborator?

Both types of Sutkus’ photography — his work publicly-sanctioned by Soviet authorities, and his private work — were approached in the same way, that is from the soul, and executed with an eye for producing a style of work that hadn’t been done before. Although forced to join the Communist Party in the 1974 under threat of closure of the Union, Antanas Sutkus always considered himself to be an artist, only later realizing the importance of his private work outside of the world of art. Although maintaining friendly relations with the communist authorities there are few Sutkus photographs of model workers or large military parades. The “Lithuanian People” project was never planned, coming from a spontaneous feeling. When he began looking through his private collection, he saw only people. His life was dedicated to communicating with people and taking photographs.

Sutkus’ last major independent project during Soviet times started in 1988 in the midst of massive changes throughout the Soviet Union. Glastnost brought a wave of activities hitherto unheard of, with mass protests and memorials taking place on an increasingly regular basis. One afternoon the photographer was invited to a gathering of Holocaust survivors from Kaunas at the Ninth Fort, one of the main locations of mass murders in Lithuania during the Holocaust. Under Soviet occupation the Holocaust was officially labeled an atrocity against the Soviet people. There was never any talk of a specifically Jewish Holocaust. Sutkus, who’d always been interested in Jewish culture, began photographing survivors from the Kaunas (Kovno) Ghetto, learning through conversations the truth about what happened in Lithuania between 1941 and 1944. The photographs became a book, “Pro Memoria,” published in 1997.

It’s typical of the complexities and contradictions of the human condition in general and the human condition in the Soviet Union in particular that Antanas Sutkus managed to produce an extraordinary body of work that, if discovered, could have cost him his freedom whilst at the same time he was drinking with Communist Party leaders and gaining favor with representatives of an oppressive occupying regime. The word “collaborator” has been used to describe him, although of course collaboration was a daily event in the lives of most people living behind the Iron Curtain.

At 70, Antanas Sutkus isn’t in good shape. A chronic smoker, recurring heart problems have led to more than one close shave with death. Ironically, one of his closest contemporary friends, the Franciscan priest and writer Julius Sasnauskas spend several years in prison under the Soviets for his beliefs.

Looking at Sutkus’ work there’s a clear distinction between the photographs he took during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania and those he took after independence. I was intrigued about this and asked him if he saw or felt any change in his work during this period of transition. He was adamant that art doesn’t change with a change of the ideological conditions it’s created under. Tellingly perhaps, the usually confident and talkative photographer took an awfully long time to answer this question. Antanas Sutkus gave up taking photographs completely in 2005 partly he says for health reasons and partly because people are no longer interesting to him.

“There are not such pure people any more. One has to love people to take pictures of them,” Sutkus told Baltic Reports.

The recipient of numerous awards including high-ranking communist ones as well as post-independence recognitions of his work for Lithuania, Antanas Sutkus spends his retirement going through his negatives, creating an archive with the help of a recent grant from the Hasselblad Foundation.

Although it can be argued that Sutkus’ photography was sometimes not quite as technically good as the work of several of his contemporaries, where he stands alone as an exceptional photographer of immense historical importance is in the sheer amount of images he took over an extended period of time and on a subject of which there’s absolutely nothing to compare. It’s an interesting fact that his work hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where historically Sutkus’ work is recognized for its historical importance, and yet, in the world of documentary photography, he remains virtually undiscovered.

If photography should be dismissed in serious academic circles on the grounds of its connections with propaganda, there really would be very little photography left.

Sutkus influenced my work because we’re both interested in ordinary people plus we also both have an anarchic, mischeivious streak. In particular I’ve been influenced by his Kasdienybės Archyvai (Daily Life Archives) project, which was kept locked away until independence.

Sutkus’ photography books are widely available in Lithuanian bookstores and make a great addition to your coffee table.

— Baltic Reports editor Nathan Greenhalgh contributed to this article.
[/private_subscription 1 month] [private_subscription 4 months]totalitarian regime doesn’t negate the artistic merit of the Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus, a photographer whose work, in the words of the online arts and culture magazine Culture Kiosk, “bears witness to the country’s subjection to Soviet rule, presenting a visual history of communism in an objective but humanistic documentary style.”

Seventy this year, Antanas Sutkus is an interesting and controversial character worth checking out. Fêted by both the Soviet authorities and the mass of ordinary (predominantly anti-Soviet) people of Lithuania during his professional working life, he produced an enormous body of work, much of it in “collaboration” with the Soviet authorities. What he also did is record on his 35mm camera literally hundreds of thousands of beautiful black and white photographs of the commonplace lives lived by the vast majority of ordinary people during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, a collection that could easily have won him a free trip to Siberia and that consequently stayed hidden away in boxes until Lithuanian independence in 1990.

Antanas Sutkus was born into a peasant family on June 26, 1939 in the tiny village of Kluoniškiai, about 20 km west of Kaunas. In November 1940 Sutkus’ father, a peat-cutter with leftist sympathies, was forced to sign documents sentencing a number of locals into Siberian exile. When he refused, the Soviets threatened to send the Sutkus family to Siberia, a fate Antanas’ father chose to solve by committing suicide. His mother remarried soon after, only to meet a similar fate when, after being drafted into the Wehrmacht after the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941 Antanas’ father-in-law refused to participate in the murder of local Jews and was taken away by the Gestapo never to be seen again. Sutkus’ mother fled to the West, leaving a young Antanas to be brought up by his grandparents.

Although what he really wanted was a radio or a bicycle, his family’s poor economic circumstances meant that a camera was all that could be afforded, an incident that in the long run was a benefit to everyone. Antanas Suktus’ reason behind exactly why he chose a camera was a typical one. It was a good way to meet girls, of whom several became subjects for his first portraits along with scenes of the local peat-cutters who worked in the fields around the village.

In 1958, by now never to be seen without his trademark Zenit 35mm camera, Sutkus began studying at Vilnius University, first reading Russian Language and Literature before switching to a journalism course although this was strictly forbidden without two years’ prior journalism experience. His obsession with photography however grew to such an extent that in his own words he ‘drowned’ in it, neglecting his studies and finally leaving university without a degree after six years of drifting.

Through his ever-growing network of connections Sutkus was already getting regular work for several publications, among them the weekly Literature ir Menas (Literature and Art), an engagement that would lead to the most famous incident in a life punctuated with many colorful events.

A record of life in the “Second World”

During the 1960s, usually in the countryside away from the prying eyes of the KGB, Antanas Sutkus photographed the ordinary people of Lithuania whenever he could, always with his Zenit camera.

As a practicing artist with excellent credentials, the photographer enjoyed a relatively lucrative career as did all artists in favor with the authorities, meaning he could photograph as much as he wanted just so long as he was careful. His personal photographic project that eventually grew into the massive “Lietuvos Žmonės” (Lithuanian People) series stands as the only substantial professional body of work reflecting a non-Homo Sovieticus outlook in Lithuania, if not the entire Soviet Union.

It’s more than worth noting that access to the work of Western photographers was extremely limited during the early part of his career. Sutkus’ style, which at times has been likened to Henri Cartier-Bresson, grew out of an intuitive eye rather than through the inspiration of others.

There are two well-known photographs of Pioneers taken by Sutkus, one of a blind Pioneer taken in 1962 and the other, from 1964, of a Pioneer with a distinctively unhappy face. The latter won a Michelangelo Gold Prize after it was entered in an Italian competition on 1970 and was subsequently published in the pan-Soviet magazine Sovietskai Foto. Its publication created uproar, with Sutkus being called the “Lithuanian Solzhenitsyn” for his betrayal and for its likeness of what appeared to many to be a concentration camp setting. Pioneers were expected to smile for the camera, it was as simple as that. There were even demands for the photographer’s imprisonment. It’s hard to comprehend such attitudes, but this was the reality of life in the Soviet Union. going a long way towards explaining the importance of his “Lietuvos Žmonės” project.

Much of Antanas Sutkus’ work appears innocuous to a Western viewer, but the reality is very different indeed. Policing photography was a full time job. Soon after it started, the Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers opened a gallery in Vilnius. Margarita Paskevičiutė, an expert on photography and Soviet censorship, worked for the Union for almost two decades and tells many stories of the KGB turning up before exhibitions were due to open and removing offensive photographs from the walls. She famously carried a sign in her pocket that read “Closed for Technical Reasons” that she would put on the gallery entrance when the gaps between the pictures got too big.

Whilst Antanas Sutkus was secretly creating a unique and historically important collection of photographs he was also working for the authorities. He was the first photographer in the Soviet Union to publish a book of photographs taken from the air, “Lietuva iš Paukščio Skrydžio” (A Bird’s Eye View of Lithuania, 1980), published in a first edition of a staggering 200,000 copies and printed on state of the art equipment in Hungary. The book graced thousands of bookshelves throughout the Soviet Union and is a testament to Suktus’ mainstream popularity.

Amusingly, one of his most well-known photographs, that remained hidden away from view until 1990, shows a rebellious-looking young man in an open shirt and sunglasses sitting on a bus with a KGB officer sitting immediately behind him. The photograph was taken during production of the book. The young man is the helicopter pilot who flew Sutkus on the photographic trips. The KGB officer was assigned to them, his job being to sit in the air traffic control tower and watch the radar to make sure neither of them defected.

Can you call him a collaborator?

Both types of Sutkus’ photography — his work publicly-sanctioned by Soviet authorities, and his private work — were approached in the same way, that is from the soul, and executed with an eye for producing a style of work that hadn’t been done before. Although forced to join the Communist Party in the 1974 under threat of closure of the Union, Antanas Sutkus always considered himself to be an artist, only later realizing the importance of his private work outside of the world of art. Although maintaining friendly relations with the communist authorities there are few Sutkus photographs of model workers or large military parades. The “Lithuanian People” project was never planned, coming from a spontaneous feeling. When he began looking through his private collection, he saw only people. His life was dedicated to communicating with people and taking photographs.

Sutkus’ last major independent project during Soviet times started in 1988 in the midst of massive changes throughout the Soviet Union. Glastnost brought a wave of activities hitherto unheard of, with mass protests and memorials taking place on an increasingly regular basis. One afternoon the photographer was invited to a gathering of Holocaust survivors from Kaunas at the Ninth Fort, one of the main locations of mass murders in Lithuania during the Holocaust. Under Soviet occupation the Holocaust was officially labeled an atrocity against the Soviet people. There was never any talk of a specifically Jewish Holocaust. Sutkus, who’d always been interested in Jewish culture, began photographing survivors from the Kaunas (Kovno) Ghetto, learning through conversations the truth about what happened in Lithuania between 1941 and 1944. The photographs became a book, “Pro Memoria,” published in 1997.

It’s typical of the complexities and contradictions of the human condition in general and the human condition in the Soviet Union in particular that Antanas Sutkus managed to produce an extraordinary body of work that, if discovered, could have cost him his freedom whilst at the same time he was drinking with Communist Party leaders and gaining favor with representatives of an oppressive occupying regime. The word “collaborator” has been used to describe him, although of course collaboration was a daily event in the lives of most people living behind the Iron Curtain.

At 70, Antanas Sutkus isn’t in good shape. A chronic smoker, recurring heart problems have led to more than one close shave with death. Ironically, one of his closest contemporary friends, the Franciscan priest and writer Julius Sasnauskas spend several years in prison under the Soviets for his beliefs.

Looking at Sutkus’ work there’s a clear distinction between the photographs he took during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania and those he took after independence. I was intrigued about this and asked him if he saw or felt any change in his work during this period of transition. He was adamant that art doesn’t change with a change of the ideological conditions it’s created under. Tellingly perhaps, the usually confident and talkative photographer took an awfully long time to answer this question. Antanas Sutkus gave up taking photographs completely in 2005 partly he says for health reasons and partly because people are no longer interesting to him.

“There are not such pure people any more. One has to love people to take pictures of them,” Sutkus told Baltic Reports.

The recipient of numerous awards including high-ranking communist ones as well as post-independence recognitions of his work for Lithuania, Antanas Sutkus spends his retirement going through his negatives, creating an archive with the help of a recent grant from the Hasselblad Foundation.

Although it can be argued that Sutkus’ photography was sometimes not quite as technically good as the work of several of his contemporaries, where he stands alone as an exceptional photographer of immense historical importance is in the sheer amount of images he took over an extended period of time and on a subject of which there’s absolutely nothing to compare. It’s an interesting fact that his work hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where historically Sutkus’ work is recognized for its historical importance, and yet, in the world of documentary photography, he remains virtually undiscovered.

If photography should be dismissed in serious academic circles on the grounds of its connections with propaganda, there really would be very little photography left.

Sutkus influenced my work because we’re both interested in ordinary people plus we also both have an anarchic, mischeivious streak. In particular I’ve been influenced by his Kasdienybės Archyvai (Daily Life Archives) project, which was kept locked away until independence.

Sutkus’ photography books are widely available in Lithuanian bookstores and make a great addition to your coffee table.

— Baltic Reports editor Nathan Greenhalgh contributed to this article.
[/private_subscription 4 months] [private_subscription 1 year]totalitarian regime doesn’t negate the artistic merit of the Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus, a photographer whose work, in the words of the online arts and culture magazine Culture Kiosk, “bears witness to the country’s subjection to Soviet rule, presenting a visual history of communism in an objective but humanistic documentary style.”

Seventy this year, Antanas Sutkus is an interesting and controversial character worth checking out. Fêted by both the Soviet authorities and the mass of ordinary (predominantly anti-Soviet) people of Lithuania during his professional working life, he produced an enormous body of work, much of it in “collaboration” with the Soviet authorities. What he also did is record on his 35mm camera literally hundreds of thousands of beautiful black and white photographs of the commonplace lives lived by the vast majority of ordinary people during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, a collection that could easily have won him a free trip to Siberia and that consequently stayed hidden away in boxes until Lithuanian independence in 1990.

Antanas Sutkus was born into a peasant family on June 26, 1939 in the tiny village of Kluoniškiai, about 20 km west of Kaunas. In November 1940 Sutkus’ father, a peat-cutter with leftist sympathies, was forced to sign documents sentencing a number of locals into Siberian exile. When he refused, the Soviets threatened to send the Sutkus family to Siberia, a fate Antanas’ father chose to solve by committing suicide. His mother remarried soon after, only to meet a similar fate when, after being drafted into the Wehrmacht after the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941 Antanas’ father-in-law refused to participate in the murder of local Jews and was taken away by the Gestapo never to be seen again. Sutkus’ mother fled to the West, leaving a young Antanas to be brought up by his grandparents.

Although what he really wanted was a radio or a bicycle, his family’s poor economic circumstances meant that a camera was all that could be afforded, an incident that in the long run was a benefit to everyone. Antanas Suktus’ reason behind exactly why he chose a camera was a typical one. It was a good way to meet girls, of whom several became subjects for his first portraits along with scenes of the local peat-cutters who worked in the fields around the village.

In 1958, by now never to be seen without his trademark Zenit 35mm camera, Sutkus began studying at Vilnius University, first reading Russian Language and Literature before switching to a journalism course although this was strictly forbidden without two years’ prior journalism experience. His obsession with photography however grew to such an extent that in his own words he ‘drowned’ in it, neglecting his studies and finally leaving university without a degree after six years of drifting.

Through his ever-growing network of connections Sutkus was already getting regular work for several publications, among them the weekly Literature ir Menas (Literature and Art), an engagement that would lead to the most famous incident in a life punctuated with many colorful events.

A record of life in the “Second World”

During the 1960s, usually in the countryside away from the prying eyes of the KGB, Antanas Sutkus photographed the ordinary people of Lithuania whenever he could, always with his Zenit camera.

As a practicing artist with excellent credentials, the photographer enjoyed a relatively lucrative career as did all artists in favor with the authorities, meaning he could photograph as much as he wanted just so long as he was careful. His personal photographic project that eventually grew into the massive “Lietuvos Žmonės” (Lithuanian People) series stands as the only substantial professional body of work reflecting a non-Homo Sovieticus outlook in Lithuania, if not the entire Soviet Union.

It’s more than worth noting that access to the work of Western photographers was extremely limited during the early part of his career. Sutkus’ style, which at times has been likened to Henri Cartier-Bresson, grew out of an intuitive eye rather than through the inspiration of others.

There are two well-known photographs of Pioneers taken by Sutkus, one of a blind Pioneer taken in 1962 and the other, from 1964, of a Pioneer with a distinctively unhappy face. The latter won a Michelangelo Gold Prize after it was entered in an Italian competition on 1970 and was subsequently published in the pan-Soviet magazine Sovietskai Foto. Its publication created uproar, with Sutkus being called the “Lithuanian Solzhenitsyn” for his betrayal and for its likeness of what appeared to many to be a concentration camp setting. Pioneers were expected to smile for the camera, it was as simple as that. There were even demands for the photographer’s imprisonment. It’s hard to comprehend such attitudes, but this was the reality of life in the Soviet Union. going a long way towards explaining the importance of his “Lietuvos Žmonės” project.

Much of Antanas Sutkus’ work appears innocuous to a Western viewer, but the reality is very different indeed. Policing photography was a full time job. Soon after it started, the Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers opened a gallery in Vilnius. Margarita Paskevičiutė, an expert on photography and Soviet censorship, worked for the Union for almost two decades and tells many stories of the KGB turning up before exhibitions were due to open and removing offensive photographs from the walls. She famously carried a sign in her pocket that read “Closed for Technical Reasons” that she would put on the gallery entrance when the gaps between the pictures got too big.

Whilst Antanas Sutkus was secretly creating a unique and historically important collection of photographs he was also working for the authorities. He was the first photographer in the Soviet Union to publish a book of photographs taken from the air, “Lietuva iš Paukščio Skrydžio” (A Bird’s Eye View of Lithuania, 1980), published in a first edition of a staggering 200,000 copies and printed on state of the art equipment in Hungary. The book graced thousands of bookshelves throughout the Soviet Union and is a testament to Suktus’ mainstream popularity.

Amusingly, one of his most well-known photographs, that remained hidden away from view until 1990, shows a rebellious-looking young man in an open shirt and sunglasses sitting on a bus with a KGB officer sitting immediately behind him. The photograph was taken during production of the book. The young man is the helicopter pilot who flew Sutkus on the photographic trips. The KGB officer was assigned to them, his job being to sit in the air traffic control tower and watch the radar to make sure neither of them defected.

Can you call him a collaborator?

Both types of Sutkus’ photography — his work publicly-sanctioned by Soviet authorities, and his private work — were approached in the same way, that is from the soul, and executed with an eye for producing a style of work that hadn’t been done before. Although forced to join the Communist Party in the 1974 under threat of closure of the Union, Antanas Sutkus always considered himself to be an artist, only later realizing the importance of his private work outside of the world of art. Although maintaining friendly relations with the communist authorities there are few Sutkus photographs of model workers or large military parades. The “Lithuanian People” project was never planned, coming from a spontaneous feeling. When he began looking through his private collection, he saw only people. His life was dedicated to communicating with people and taking photographs.

Sutkus’ last major independent project during Soviet times started in 1988 in the midst of massive changes throughout the Soviet Union. Glastnost brought a wave of activities hitherto unheard of, with mass protests and memorials taking place on an increasingly regular basis. One afternoon the photographer was invited to a gathering of Holocaust survivors from Kaunas at the Ninth Fort, one of the main locations of mass murders in Lithuania during the Holocaust. Under Soviet occupation the Holocaust was officially labeled an atrocity against the Soviet people. There was never any talk of a specifically Jewish Holocaust. Sutkus, who’d always been interested in Jewish culture, began photographing survivors from the Kaunas (Kovno) Ghetto, learning through conversations the truth about what happened in Lithuania between 1941 and 1944. The photographs became a book, “Pro Memoria,” published in 1997.

It’s typical of the complexities and contradictions of the human condition in general and the human condition in the Soviet Union in particular that Antanas Sutkus managed to produce an extraordinary body of work that, if discovered, could have cost him his freedom whilst at the same time he was drinking with Communist Party leaders and gaining favor with representatives of an oppressive occupying regime. The word “collaborator” has been used to describe him, although of course collaboration was a daily event in the lives of most people living behind the Iron Curtain.

At 70, Antanas Sutkus isn’t in good shape. A chronic smoker, recurring heart problems have led to more than one close shave with death. Ironically, one of his closest contemporary friends, the Franciscan priest and writer Julius Sasnauskas spend several years in prison under the Soviets for his beliefs.

Looking at Sutkus’ work there’s a clear distinction between the photographs he took during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania and those he took after independence. I was intrigued about this and asked him if he saw or felt any change in his work during this period of transition. He was adamant that art doesn’t change with a change of the ideological conditions it’s created under. Tellingly perhaps, the usually confident and talkative photographer took an awfully long time to answer this question. Antanas Sutkus gave up taking photographs completely in 2005 partly he says for health reasons and partly because people are no longer interesting to him.

“There are not such pure people any more. One has to love people to take pictures of them,” Sutkus told Baltic Reports.

The recipient of numerous awards including high-ranking communist ones as well as post-independence recognitions of his work for Lithuania, Antanas Sutkus spends his retirement going through his negatives, creating an archive with the help of a recent grant from the Hasselblad Foundation.

Although it can be argued that Sutkus’ photography was sometimes not quite as technically good as the work of several of his contemporaries, where he stands alone as an exceptional photographer of immense historical importance is in the sheer amount of images he took over an extended period of time and on a subject of which there’s absolutely nothing to compare. It’s an interesting fact that his work hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where historically Sutkus’ work is recognized for its historical importance, and yet, in the world of documentary photography, he remains virtually undiscovered.

If photography should be dismissed in serious academic circles on the grounds of its connections with propaganda, there really would be very little photography left.

Sutkus influenced my work because we’re both interested in ordinary people plus we also both have an anarchic, mischeivious streak. In particular I’ve been influenced by his Kasdienybės Archyvai (Daily Life Archives) project, which was kept locked away until independence.

Sutkus’ photography books are widely available in Lithuanian bookstores and make a great addition to your coffee table.

— Baltic Reports editor Nathan Greenhalgh contributed to this article.
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