Editorial

When I decided to compile this No. 1(37) issue of “Photography” magazine, published by the Lithuanian Photographers’ Association, my initial thought was that of filmmakers who take photographs and of photographers who create films. The personal exhibition of Juozas Kazlauskas titled “Weekend in Hell”, held in 2017(18), was purely about a film set, its dynamics, the mood behind the scenes, the pauses and the creation of the film or, at times, illusion. In the process of putting this issue together, I realised that drawing the line at filmset photography would not be fair, since there has been a long-lasting relationship between photography and cinema right from the emergence of both forms of media; so, a simple overview of the event’s documentation would be inadequate.

Both types of media have their own specifics, which is precisely what determines the relationship between them. They each offer a different view at content, the approach to memory, and can be mutually complementary. One magazine issue is far from enough to discuss all the aspects of the relationship between the two media, but we’ve made an effort to bring the reader information spanning from scientific research about photography in cinema to an entertaining conversation with an artist who tells his own story of working with both types of media.

We were extremely lucky that Natalija Arlauskaitė is almost simultaneously finishing writing her book “Fierce Peace: Photography of Failed Regimes in Documentary Films”. I would like to express my gratitude to her for the excellent excerpt titled “Iconic War Photography in Cinema” that has been specifically prepared for our publication.

Ilona Vitkauskaitė explores the strategies of reconstructions and re-enactments of the past in cinema and photography based on the documentary “The Act of Killing” (dir. J. Oppenheimer) and the works by photographer Alexander Gronsy.

Egor Schmonin, a film researcher from Canada, drops by for a visit to take a glance at the array of Lithuanian poetic cinema and photography, and is surprised to recognise the defining works of Lithuanian photographers. The author invites the global viewer to consider the Baltic region’s poetic and metaphorical creative work during the Soviet era as a particular phenomenon of documentality as well as a device for the generation of that time to raise questions on identity, peaceful political acts, internal conflict and society’s other efforts to retain its identity.

The magazine includes three interviews with highly diverse people who have had experience with both cinema and photography in highly diverse aspects. Arūnas Kulikauskas reflects on his experience working with Jonas Mekas, selecting and printing photographs from film strips. These works have passed through multiple well-known exhibition spaces all over the world. The readers are invited to enjoy an exhibition of this series at the MO Museum (Pylimo 17, Vilnius) from 2019 11 29 until 2020 08 16.

In the discourse on cinema and photography, Juozas Budraitis’ photography should not be eliminated. It is plentiful and varied, from portrait and documentary to intuitively documented urban wall textures. Juozas Budraitis’ less exhibited images of film sets are showcased here as well, reflecting the mood of a lunch break, of waiting, of a workday’s end. And talking with the author eventually came to be more about photography and how to tame it than of cinema.

We should also not forget the first Lithuanian film “No Routine” created only out of photographs back in 2007 by director Juratė Samulionytė. We also invite you to read the conversation with her about the creative process and the challenges.

It has almost become a tradition to organise an exhibition together with the magazine’s publication. We titled it “24 Frames a Second and More Slowly”. The exhibition is held at the Vilnius Photography Gallery (Stiklių 4 / Didžioji 19) from 2019 12 10 to 2020 01 11. The participating artists are: Juozas Budraitis, Paulius Makauskas, Algimantas Mockus, Viktoras Radzevičius, Audrius Zavadskis, Paulius Zavadskis and Miglė Narbutaitė. The exhibition will include a screening of director Juratė Samulionytė’s “No Routine”, which received a Silver Crane award in the short film category.