Personal identity in Ramunė Pigagaitė’s photographic cycle "People of my town"

A great part of Lithuanian photography created at the end of the twentieth century belongs to the field of contemporary photography, which reflects on socio-cultural problems and is conceived beyond the boundaries of aesthetics of traditional art photography. Many creators of such photography analyze the problem of personal identity and its relations to the photographic image. This article analyses an outstanding example of such kind of photography – a photographic cycle by a Lithuanian photographer Ramunė Pigagaitė “The People of My Town”. The analysis, based on the psychoanalytical theory developed by Jacques Lacan, focuses on two main issues: the relation between the identity of the photographed person and the photographic image, and the relation between the identity of the photographer and the photographic images she created. The relation between the identity of the photographed person and the photographic image reveals its paradoxical nature in the above mentioned photographic cycle. On the one hand, it shows not the “real” personal identity of the people, but only the enactment of social roles, directed by photographer. On the other hand, formal properties of the photographs, which remind of the documentary photography, imply the objectivity of photographic imaging and emphasize its documentary nature. This aspect of Pigagaitė‘s photographic cycle relates it to the work of other Lithuanian photographers who define personal identity as a performative phenomena instead of trying to show its “true” essence. The traditional relation between the identity of the photographer and the photographic images undergoes inversion in Pigagaitė‘s photographic cycle. The latter functions as the realization of the author’s childhood memories in the present time and fills in the cultural and temporal gap between her childhood experiences gained in small Lithuanian town Varėna and her present life in Germany.[...]Vytauto Didžiojo universiteta