| Abstract [eng] |
It is inexpedient now to talk about is photography an art, or it isn’t. It’s a result of the concordance that there are some kind of symbiosis between artistry and documentary in photography. Additionally, photography has modified the protocol with industry, with science, with advertising, with journalism, with communication, with art, with everyday life… Consequently photography can’t yet be studied as an autonomous discipline. It is more productive to look at it in its applications in other fields. For this reason it is necessary to analyze the photographs of Antanas Sutkus, the famous Lithuanian photographer, in the fields of anthropology, of social and communication sciences and of art. The other problem is that various European countries, to say nothing of whole continents (for example so called Third World), have been left on the fringes of the histories of photography. To avoid this mistake it is purposeful to look at the photographs of Antanas Sutkus also in the context of the Western countries that have their own photographic traditions. Furthermore, there are some principal filters – cultural, ideological and political – that have determined the dominant historiographic models and the photographic tradition itself. The major part of Antanas’ Sutkus’ photographs were made when Lithuania was the constituent of the Soviet Union. Consequently it is imperative to talk about Soviet ideology that carried authority on the creation of Antanas Sutkus and on the entire Lithuanian photographic tradition. Not a barrel of these contexts can show that a documentary and an artistry coexist in the photography of Antanas Sutkus. This coexistence seems evident when some transformations take part. For example, when the press photo, which was closely subordinated with text, appears in the galleries or in the photo albums that can change its original meaning. There again, the relevant political-social substance of photography can become a conformation of the photographer’s creative interpretation. Therefore it is possible to say, that photographs of Antanas Sutkus can not be only an object of study, because it is also an instrument of study. Not only history makes photography of this famous Lithuanian photographer, but also his photography produces history. |
