Honorable guests,

I would like to salute the international Noorderlicht festival that year after year keeps destroying the walls of the Western culture by turning its professional gaze towards Africa, Latin America or the worlds of Arabic and Asian nations. This year the interest in the Eastern Europe has raised, to my mind, a very important and relevant problem - the art of this region and especially photography still remains beyond the bounds. We are not divided by the seas, we live on the same continent, we have lots of similar traditions, we belong to the European Union, but nevertheless the processes of cultural integration are very slow.
I witnessed the construction of the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the Cold War. I happened to be in Berlin when it was destroyed. At that time I believed that we will be embraced by the world's cultural community as its equal members as we have accumulated a very strong potential of photographic art. Next year it will be twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and forty years since the establishment of the Lithuanian Union of Photographic Art, the first and only organization that united photo artists in the Soviet Union. I have been taking an active part in the national photographic movement since its very establishment and I cannot say that it was easier then. We had to prove the local functionaries that photography is a form of art, and that Lithuanian artists are very strong. Alas, today I encounter no less difficult problems - we are shunned by the liberal and open Western world. During the Soviet times our works reached the world by means of joined exhibitions of the Soviet Union photographers that were very often initiated and compiled in Vilnius. We were persistent and stout, therefore did not remain unnoticed - the works of Lithuanian photographers were exhibited in prestigious centers of photography; their names had been included into world's encyclopedias.
Nowadays it is very hard to persuade museums and galleries in the West to take our works as the rules are dictated by the market that shuts out the creative 'baggage' accumulated in the Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall has been destroyed in the political sense, but not in the intellectual. I follow closely the tendencies of photographic exhibitions and publishing and I have to admit that, alas, the photographic arena is dominated by the same approved Western photographers. Their republished albums are just different variations of presented works and covers. I have not heard that large publishing houses would have offered photographers of our region to publish their works or at least expressed the wish to get acquainted with their oeuvre. The situation with the analysis of photographic history is the same. The old truths and names are repeated, there are no new theories developed or new interpretations offered. Open any history of the world's photography and try to find some information about the Eastern European photography. You may stumble upon a laconic mention of one or two photographers but you will close the book completely ignorant of the processes that have been happening in our region. And believe me, they are no less interesting and complex. We are not some mystical Atlantis. We are alive and we have preserved our works that are waiting to be known and comprehended. Yes, we lived 'behind walls', as the main exhibition of the festival says, but we were concerned by the same universal things - man and his existence. The inner life has no walls and it cannot be confined by the 'iron curtains'.
I have been taking pictures for half a century already but man has always been the centerpiece of my oeuvre. I have known form the very beginning what is important to me. I have started the series People of Lithuania and kept doing it all my life. My best shots are taken in rural or urban streets, and my protagonists are ordinary passers-by. The inner contact has been very improtant to me. A momentary encounter can tell a lot. I value photography for its ability to penetrate into a human soul, and the 'recepie' of my oeuvre is very simple indeed - you just have to love people.
These reflections are directed towards the future, not the past. How can national priorities be combined and integrated into the everchanging global medium of communication? I think that the main answer is tolerance. Tolerance to differet cultures and attention to an individual being.

Antanas Sutkus, September 2008