Breaking Point in Lithuanian photography of the soviet period: parallels between Vilnius and Kaunas

Straipsnyje aptariami XX a. 8 dešimtmečio pabaigoje lietuvių fotografijoje įvykę stilistiniai pokyčiai. Analizuojami naujos raiškos bruožai, susiformavimo priežastys ir oponavimo tradicinei lietuvių fotografijos mokyklai problemos. Lyginamajai analizei pasitelkti ukrainiečių, lenkų fotografijos avangardo pavyzdžiai, liudijantys bendras postmodernistines tendencijas Rytų Europoje.The evolution of photography in the Soviet era is directly linked with stages in the political process and can be observed in the formation of three artistic waves: the photojournalism of Stalin's socialist realism was all-encompassing; the policines implemented by Nikita Khrushchev created conditions for a new documentaty form directed at the social environment; while the devisualization movement conveyed Leonid Brezhnev's stagnation crisis and brought significance to postmodernist views. The differences delineated in these artistic trends are encountered within the creative processes and artistic strategies of photography. Expression was completely regulated during the early period of occupation. Photographers were guided by a strictly-regimented construction of images based on the iconography of Soviet symbolism and the creation of generalized content. The new documentarians of the Khrushchev Thaw period turned to humanist world views and sought evidence of them in real life. The third generation of photography artists defined avant-garde trends, disassociated themselves from all rcp-resentational forms injected during the Soviet era, and announced a purely artistic approach to photographic interpretation. Anti-aesthetic expression, which arose in the late 1970s, conceptually illustrated that photography can be more than just a reflection or a direct result of political and social facts; it demonstrated that it can also be an independent and unique work o f art, which is created by the author's consciousness and makes use of reality only for material. Meanwhile, due to its interchangeable photographic content and organisation of formalistic composition, the expressions originating from the third stylistic wave were unsettling for cultural politicians, as well as the community of photographers that had been forming the criteria for the standard of values in photography art for several decades. This type of photography lost its significance as a visual tool because its meaning lurked in the artefact, which young artists also illustrated in a form that was inadequate for upholding aesthetic principles. Photography was labelled a modern, but nonetheless "superficial" art by the school itself, and the pioneers of the postmodernist philosophy instilled devisualization practices. The sphere of photography experienced marked changes, from declarations of visionary truth to conceptualisation processes that challenge the nature of totalitarianism