A Distant, Overlooked Life
Vitas Luckus was too revolutionary a photographer to be accepted. But his is no ordinary rebel’s story.
The further away we get from a specific time, the harder it becomes to understand that time. Distance from the ideologies and world views that shaped that time is as much an issue as distance from the time and location itself. When I first read about this concept, I was fascinated. Is it really so difficult to understand another time? We have historical records to understand the context and photos to see the moments, no?
Often, we take what we know about history and assemble it into a picture. We are prone to look at photos and make sense of a time only with what’s frozen in the frame. Images are seductive like that. They can lure us into thinking that there’s no historical distance worth noting; that the past is like an illustrated story with just one possible conclusion.
Let’s begin with the ending, then. Let’s start by saying that Lithuanian photographer Vitas Luckus died after jumping out of the window of his 5th floor apartment in the winter of 1987. That his wife found him in the snow.
