JONAS DOVYDĖNAS EXHIBITION RETURN TO THE ABANDONED LAND

These photographs contain what caught my eye in Lithuania during the second decade of independence, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. My goal is to show a continuous, realistic view of the world, which I want to get to know better. I am not inclined to condemn or praise, I just want to connect everything and evaluate it in my own way. My work is incapable of conveying the suffering and endurance, pride, guilt and hope of a nation that was on the path of inexplicable, boundless evil. I can only show more than meets the eye – a mark imprinted by the history of shared and personal life on the faces of the people I meet. The most successful photos are the ones where there is more of this than what was revealed when I was shooting. My hope is that my favorite black and white photography will make you see more than the surface. I – like everyone else – only take pictures with my camera, and the truth lies beyond the recorded facts.

Let the viewer forgive that photos without captions are the usual minimal information. My goal is not documentary, nothing “important” happens in the photos. And what is happening in them or frozen in a state of rest is just my reflected thought, which may or may not be stated by the caption next to the photo. For an hour, let’s focus on the somewhat mysterious world of the camera, the way a little girl looks, naively believing that a bird is perched inside.