Planet Lithuania

Sutkus, AntanasBorn in Kluoniskiai, Lithuania, in 1939, Antanas Sutkus earned a degree in journalism in Vilnius and worked for daily newspapers before co-founding the Lithuanian Photographers' Association in 1969, which he headed for many years. Sutkus was president of the Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers upon its establishment in 1996 and has been its honorary president since 2009. He is the recipient of the Lithuanian National Culture and Arts Award and the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gedimas, an Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation Grant and the 2017 Erich Salomon Award of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie. Sutkus' work has been exhibited extensively and will be shown in late 2018 at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius on the hundredth anniversary of the Republic of Lithuania.

This book is a rich overview of Antanas Sutkus' photos of the people of his native Lithuania during its occupation by the Soviet Union. Sutkus is above all a humanist photographer, his "kosmos" his fellow citizens-children, lovers, the elderly; how they engage with modernity and tradition, nature and the city, and express their identities-all captured in a frank, empathetic style that is far removed from soviet ideals and forms the foundation of the Lithuanian school of photography.By revealing individual lives of dignity and integrity behind the Iron Curtain, Sutkus' work is as political as it is personal, a record of Lithuania's assertion of its cultural self against the Soviet Union which occupied the country from the Second World War until 1990. That struggle has since come to fruition: in 2004 Lithuania became a member of both NATO and the European Union, and is today one of Europe's fasting growing economies.