Overview

Antanas Sutkus’ photographs of the Soviet era show us a fragment of the past. With all its sorts. High and low courtiers. Desperately trying to live. The enslaved and the overseers, who were also overseen. Let us see them. - Vytautas Landsbergis For a good 25 years Antanas Sutkus photographed the Communist Party of Lithuania, modeled on Moscow ideology and in power from the Second World War until Lithuania’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1990. The party was (particularly for the West) a mystery in plain sight: strictly centralized and secretive, and an expert controller of information about itself. As a certified party photographer Sutkus documented official events and parades, while as a journalist he was commissioned by party members to portray them individually—thus entering the enclosure of power on different levels. Beyond his authorized work Sutkus importantly made images that he could not publish at the time: those not optimistic enough, not in line with party ideals or censorship norms. These he hid away in drawers for decades; many are published in this book for the first time. The Sweet Life combines revealing contradictory images of the inner life of communism with the glitz with which the party celebrated itself. The final section of the book shifts focus from opulence to the everyday: Sutkus captures in black and white—and exceptionally for him in color—the people’s struggles for small moments of happiness under a seemingly inescapable regime.

Full Product Details

9783969992982

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Born in Kluoniškiai, 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 estab- lishment 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 has exhibited extensively, including his 2018 retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius held on the hundredth anniversary of the Republic of Lithuania. Sutkus’ books with Steidl are Planet Lithuania (2018), Pro Memoria (2020), Children (2021) and Street Life (2022). Texts by Mingaile Jurkute, Vytautas Landsbergis, Gintautas Mazeikis and Thomas Schirmbock

Tab Content 6

Countries Available