Contemporary Lithuanian Photography: The Discourse of Memory
Contemporary Lithuanian Photography: The Discourse of Memory

Summary/Abstract: As Lithuania approached the twentieth anniversary of its independence, the need to consider the development of contemporary culture resulted in histories of various media, including photography. The latter posed specific methodological problems because of its heterogeneity and involvement in the social and political history of the country, not only as an artefact, but also as a recorder and catalyst of change. Therefore, a historian can neither use traditional art historical approaches that emphasise style and iconographic analysis nor focus exclusively on photography as a medium used by artists. This paper provides an example of writing a history of contemporary photography as part of visual culture, in which images are artists’ texts about memory, meta-texts about the status of photographs as tools of memory, documents that record memory and artefacts that help to recover memory.

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