Photographers Underground

On Sunday, I saw the exhibit ZOO Photography. Kaunas. The Last Decade of the Soviet Era. at the Lithuanian National Gallery of Art in Vilnius.  The exhibit features the work of a group of young photographers in Kaunas in the 1980s who resisted Soviet strictures of socialist-realism.   They were called “The Predators” because they often gathered in the photography lab of the Kaunas Zoo, located near the predators dens.  Arūnas Kulikauskas, Gintautas Stulgaitis, Visvaldas Dragūnas, Giedrius Liagas and Saulius Paukštys experimented with photography as a form of creative expression.  Unable to officially show their work during the Soviet period, they are now being recognized for their contributions to Lithuanian photography.  The exhibit was excellent and I hope to have a chance to see more of their work now that I know about them.

Juodis Mindaugaas (Black Mindaugas), by Giedrius Liagas

By Arūnas Kulikauskas