Vitas Luckus - Küryba. Works - 2014

a major bilingual (Lithuanian–English) monograph and photography collection dedicated to Vitas Luckus, one of Lithuania's most innovative and rebellious twentieth-century photographers. Published in 2014 by the Lithuanian Art Museum and compiled by Margarita Matulytė and Tatjana Luckienė-Aldag, the book showcases his conceptual framing, iconic portraits, and avant-garde documentary style.

The monograph of Vitas Luckus is a comprehensive study of the photographer’s creative legacy, which presents the whole spectrum of this original creative artist’s ideas and output and reveals the author as a cultural phenomenon to readers in Lithuania and abroad for the first time. These revelations of cultural studies and personal history fundamentally alter the outlook on the cultural processes of photography in the Soviet era.

Vitas Luckus (1943–1987) was a person of the modern era with a reformer’s spirit and a prophet’s destiny. This artist was one of the first in the Soviet Union to make a bridge to post-modernism, using his avant-garde creativity to widen the aesthetic limits that had dominated the Lithuanian school of photography. In this publication, the artistic works of Luckus are accompanied by the author’s captions, letters and documents. Reminiscences by the photographer’s near ones, friends and colleagues about his work, his favourite activities and his tragic fate as well as some incisive comments by art critics bring alive this charismatic character’s portrait and lay open his cultural panorama. According to Tatjana Luckienė-Aldag, who took care of the photographer’s archive, it was important not just to compile all the information held, but to present it in such a way that people would understand Vitas’s ideas and feel his spirit.

„Vitas Luckus. Work.“, 2014 m., 486 p., paper: Arctic Paper Artic Volume Ivory 150 g/m; Arctic Paper munken Pure Rought 120 g/m. Edition of 900 egz.

Created by: Margarita Matulytė ir Tatjana Luckienė-Aldag
Published by: Lietuvos fotomenininkų sąjungos Kauno skyrius, Lietuvos dailės muziejus
Printing house: KOPA
Design: Jurgis Griškevičius

Vitas Luckus advocated a style in much of his work in which there was no hierarchy of meaning: every element in the composition was of equal importance. To him, only then was it possible to capture the “truth” and represent the essence of a scene and of life itself.

His fascination with photography from a young age provided him with an artistic outlet to express his rebellious refusal to adhere to the conventional standards of beauty, regulations which were firmly guarded by the Lithuanian government at the time. Throughout much of his life, he experienced a series of ongoing confrontations with the authorities because of his “controversial” images.

This site is dedicated to presenting some of his best work. Many of these images have been on display at exhibitions and museums around the globe. Each of the photographs here are reproduced from his original work and negatives. The collection has been lovingly curated by his wife Tanya so that the world can share his vision of beauty, everyday life and the struggle of the human spirit.