On the 9th of March at 5.30 pm, the Photography Museum opens a renowned Lithuanian documentary and portrait photographer Tadas Kazakevičius’s exhibition “Soon to be Gone“. Tadas Kazakevičius takes a nostalgic look at his homeland and attempts to capture the times and things that were destined to soon come to an end.
As far back as in the 1930s, during the times of the Great Depression in the United States, a group of photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Jack Delano, led by Roy Stryker, Head of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), kept restlessly recording views which were soon destined to fade into obscurity. The continuous migration of people moving around in search of easier conditions of life was relentlessly changing the demographical map of the States: homesteads, villages, small towns were disappearing right before the eyes. All this was photographed and put into extensive archives – the effort of those photographers proved not to have been in vain.
A somehow different process is ongoing in present-day Lithuania too. Neither in the scope nor the conditions of life should those two situations be compared, though something still prompts us to look for similarities.
Just within the last decade, this continuous migration has caused the population of Lithuania to shrink by almost one-sixth. Towns that have usurped the whole economics and are sucking out young people to the cities, inappropriate lifestyle often adopted by the young rural generation – those who are still here – all this is inexorably changing our country. Just one question inevitably arises: for how long will our forests and valleys be adorned by views of homesteads and villages – places where a totally different understanding of time and closeness still exists? For how long will there still be found places where an unexpected visitor is met like a close relative and every passer-by is greeted with a heartfelt ‘hello’?
Every time a thought like that crosses my mind, I, as a photographer, am driven by an instinct to hurry and turn those symbols and places into something more than just memories in the stories of future grandparents. Though a recorded image is incapable of reviving what has been lost, it still lets us remember something that perhaps once, while speeding by, momentarily caught our eye at the roadside. Maybe this monument to the Lithuanian countryside will evoke some sentimentality from the viewer and touch those deeply hidden corners in the memory which we, seemingly inadvertently, have closed up, being used to accept what can be gone very quickly.
Tadas Kazakevičius
The exhibition will be hosted from 9 March until 22 May 2022
Organizer
The Photography museum
Partner
The National Museum of Lithuania
Our website uses cookies. We use these cookies for statistical and marketing purposes.
If you consent to the use of these cookies, please click “accept” and continue browsing our website.
Our request form uses Google Recaptcha which helps us distinguish you from online robots sending us spam messages.
Thus to ensure the functioning of this request form, you have to click "accept performance cookies".
You can select which cookies are to be accepted.
Find out more about our Cookies and Privacy Policy.
Functionality (necessary) cookiesThese cookies are essential to the functioning of the website and they cannot be disabled. They do not store any personally identifiable information and are deleted once you leave the website. |
|
Performance CookiesThese cookies are used to measure the use of the website and traffic sources in order to gain information required to improve the functioning of the website. These cookies help us to determine which pages are the most popular and to learn about the users’ browsing habits. To this end we use the Google Analytics statistical engine. We do not disclose any information we have collected. All information gathered is completely anonymous and cannot identify you personally. |
|
Marketing cookiesThese third-party cookies are used to display ads personalized to your needs. We use cookies that help us to collect information on your web surfing behaviour and allow us to learn about your interests so that we could display only those ads that are relevant to you. Leave this box unchecked if you do not want us to show you any advertising. |