Antanas Sutkus Lithuanian, b. 1939

Antanas Sutkus (b. 1939) is the outstanding figure of Lithuanian photography and a founder of its humanist school, who made an intimate record of ordinary life under Soviet rule at a time when photography was expected to present model citizens and model workers. He has photographed his country for six decades and made the portraits of Jean-Paul Sartre in the dunes at Nida that remain the best-known images of the philosopher.

Born in Kluoniškiai, near Kaunas, in 1939 and raised without a father, who died in the war, Sutkus took up photography seriously as a student at Vilnius University in 1959, initially working in photojournalism. He co-founded the Photography Art Society of Lithuania and served as its president for many years, giving the medium an institutional standing in the republic that it had not previously enjoyed.

His work is built on an intuitive method and on trust. He seeks an emotional connection with the person in front of his camera and photographs the ordinary moment rather than the official one. People of Lithuania, begun in 1976 and continuing to the present, is his central body of work: black-and-white portraits of people going about their lives across the country. The archive he has built around it runs to hundreds of thousands of negatives.

In 1965, he accompanied Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir during their week-long visit to Lithuania, alongside the writers Eduardas Mieželaitis and Mykolas Sluckis. His photograph of Sartre walking across the dunes at Nida, his coat flying against the white sand, carried Sutkus’s name abroad and remains the image by which the philosopher is best known outside Lithuania.

Un Regard Libre was shown at Le Château d’Eau in Toulouse in 2011, followed by the retrospective A Nostalgia for Bare Feet at the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography in Moscow in 2016. Sutkus received a grant from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation in 2001, the Lithuanian National Prize for Art in 2003, the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas, and the Erich Salomon Award in 2017. His work is held in public collections in Lithuania and abroad, including the MO Museum in Vilnius and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented his work in Summer Glow (2024).