The Republic Beyond the River

No, not that of Transdnistria, but a much smaller and certainly much more cheerful one. This republic lays beyond the little river of Vilnius, in the former ghetto, populated after the deportation of the Jews first by the underworld and the city’s poorest residents, and then, from the 70’s onwards, an increasing number of penniless artists. They proclaimed in 1997 the Užupis – that is, Beyond the River – Republic, which has its own president and bishop, embassy in Moscow and no less than four flags.


According to the founding legend of the republic, after the removal of the Lenin statues, the empty pedestal piqued the sense of beauty of the artists, and they joined forces to carve on it, in Socialist Realist style, the statue of Frank Zappa. The movement filled the local community with such a consciousness that they decided: they become independent from Lithuania, which does not care about the desolate quarter, and take their destiny into their own hands. Whatever happened, the symbol of the independent state is now the angel statue erected on its main street in 2002. It is this symbol which gave the new official name of the new state: The Angel’s Republic, announces proudly the visa, stamped in the visitors’ passport in the pub standing at the Užupis bridgehead of the border river.

Photos by Alexandr Belenkiy

La República del Otro Lado del Río

No es la de Transnistria sino una mucho menor y ciertamente mucho más acogedora. Esta república se ha establecido más allá del pequeño río de Vilnius, en el antiguo gueto repoblado, tras la deportación de los judíos, primero por marginados y por los más pobres de la ciudad y luego, desde los setenta, por un creciente número de artistas bohemios y de pocos posibles. Son ellos los que proclamaron en 1997 la República de Užupis («del otro lado del río»), con su propio presidente, obispo y embajador en Moscú, y dotada nada menos que de cuatro banderas.


Según la leyenda acerca de la fundación de la República, una vez que hubieron retirado la estatua de Lenin, el pedestal vacío espoleó el sentido estético de los artistas, que unieron sus fuerzas para colocar allí, en el mejor estilo del realismo socialista, una estatua de Frank Zappa. Esta iniciativa despertó tan vivamente sus conciencias que tomaron una solemne decisión: independizarse de Lituania ya que se había desinteresado por completo de aquel barrio desolado, y forjar su propio destino con las manos. Sea como fuere, ahora el símbolo del estado independiente es la estatua del ángel que erigieron en la calle mayor en 2002. Es esta la imagen que ha dado finalmente el nombre oficial al nuevo estado: República del Ángel es el sello que estampan orgullosamente en el pasaporte de todos los visitantes que entran en la taberna al extremo del puente, sobre la misma orilla del río.

Fotos de Alexandr Belenkiy

Romualdas Požerskis

The Moscow exhibition of the fifty year old “Lithuanian school” we have written about yesterday was a retrospective show of the founding masters of the movement, so it did not include many of its important figures who, because of their age, were not yet able to participate at the exhibition of 1969 which gave name to the school. They include Romualdas Požerskis, who at the time of the exhibition was eighteen year old and had just enrolled in the Kaunas engineering college, and who first took part at a photo exhibition in 1973. For him the “FotoSoyuz” gallery has just organized a retrospective exhibition which closed a month ago today in Moscow.

The exhibition has selected from four series of the master. The Lithuanian old cities and Church feasts were both composed in 1974. The Gardens of memory, showing village cemeteries, was photographed in 1984. He started The joys and sorrows of little Alfons in 1992, and although he published the album in 1998, he has kept regularly visiting the main character of the series, about whom he writes like this:

“In 1992 I started to take photos on the smallest (90 cm high) man in Lithuania, the farmer Alfons Mickus, whose life was rich in both sad and happy events. Since then I often visit Alfons, I talk to him, I try to pay off my debt. He impresses me as a very strong man. If he does not like something, he openly says it in your face. He gets on well with me, and if he needs it, I take him wherever he wants. As a photographer, I am not “aggressive” with him, I do not want to set him into artificial situations or to force him to play. Our greatest common adventure was a journey to the sea. Although he lived 70 years near the sea, he had never seen it or heard the sound of the waves. The sea was his cherished dream. When he caught sight of the Baltic sea, he ran to it, went into the water, and his shoes soon turned green from the algae. “Who plants vegetables in the sea?” he wondered.

Alfons’ life is the epic of his fight with the blow that fell upon him. He had ceased to grow in the childhood, when he was attacked by a rooster, and his parents wanted to give their unloved child to a circus. In Stalin’s era his name was on the list of those who were going to be exiled to Siberia for the public performance of political songs. During the Lithuanian rebirth he was anxious for the independence of the country, and in January 1991 he was in Vilnius among the defenders of the Parliament.”

The Lithuanian school

A few months ago opened in Moscow the photo exhibition “The Lithuanian school. Western photography in the Soviet Union”. The title refers to the famous exhibition organized by a group of young Lithuanian photographers in 1969 in the Moscow House of Journalists, which astonished the Russians with its fresh and free vision and immediately created the term of the “Lithuanian school”. This exhibition earned for the Lithuanian photography not only prestige, but also a certain degree of freedom: among all the Soviet republics, they were the only one to be allowed to set up their own association of photographers, as well as to send their photos abroad. Lithuanian photographers took full advantage of it, and from the 70s on they regularly appeared and won awards at prestigious Western European exhibitions, while conveying the experiences gained there to the other photographers of the Soviet Union.


On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 exhibition the Photo Gallery of Brothers Lumière in Moscow organized the first event in a series entitled “The classics of Lithuanian photography”, the retrospective exhibition of one of the school’s founders, Alexander Macijauskas. In the same and the following year a number of similar events followed, which are now summarized in the present, comprehensive exhibition.


Andrei Baskakov, president of the Russian Federation of Photographic Art, recalls in the foreword to the exhibition catalog:

“I remember well how into the Soviet photography of the late 1960s almost literally burst in, just like a Baltic storm, the fresh wind of the new themes, sights and compositions of the photos of those young, 30-year-old Lithuanian boys. This phenomenon was so striking and unusual for the audience accustomed to the standard portraits of success workers, building cranes, harversters working on the fields, that the new trend – thanks to the journal Soviet photo – immediately won the best places in the publications, exhibitions and photo albums.

The Lithuanian photographers were perhaps the first ones in the USSR who showed in such a simple, warm and poetic way the not always festive life of peasants, pioneers, school teachers, rural doctors. Macijauskas’ Village fair brought a revolution to the mind of a generation of photographrs, and the wide-angle “Russar” instantly became the most popular and almost unavailable photographic lens. Rakauskas in the Bloomings showed the essence of springtime, and Sutkus composed a veritable encyclopedia of the people of that difficult era.

Kunčius, Straukas, Butyrin, Luckus, Gvozd, Šonta, Požerskis – in Russia they very quickly got used to the Lithuanian names. Antanas, Alexandras, Vaclovas, Romualdas began to come to Moscow as if they went home here, and Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian photographers also regularly traveled to Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipeda, Šiauliai and Nida to learn, to make friends, to discuss, to drink… These were the years when we were together, when there were no visas, passports, customs, only an immense desire to show ourselves and to see the others.”

Alexandras Macijauskas (from the series Village fair)

Romualdas Rakauskas (mainly from the series Bloomings)

“There are images and there are counter-images. A counter-image is produced as an act of resistance against a dominant, official and public image. The vast archive of 700,000 photos by Antanas Sutkus, collected between 1956 and 1989 on the daily life of the communist Lithuania, is one of the most important archives of counter-images ever produced in the world. Each photo of Sutkus, to paraphrase Orwell, is “a pinch of a counter-revolution”, an act of opposition against the visual ideology of the regime.”

Ben Lewis’ foreword in the catalog of Sutkus’ exhibition in the Château d’Eau Gallery of Paris, March 2011

Antanas Sutkus