Snapshots from Soviet Lithuania

For their attention to everyday life and their tender spirit, Antanas Sutkus's photographs in Planet Lithuania often evoke the spirit of Robert Doisneau, André Kertész, or Paul Strand—but Sutkus only discovered their work and that of other photographers of the humanist school much later in life, when he first traveled outside his country in 1992. Cultural isolation meant there was no access to photography books in Lithuania. Sutkus's vast collection of images of everyday life in Lithuania under Communism from 1956 to 1991 is one of the largest existing archives of life under Soviet rule, a record of simple, quiet resistance.