Jonas Dovydėnas’ exhibition ‘Another Country Also Mine (1966-2022)’ will be on display at Kaunas Photography Gallery starting February 16.
These photographs are my observations of Lithuania in its second decade of independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. My goal is to maintain a steadfast, truthful vision of my native land. My purpose is neither to condemn nor flatter – only to praise in my own way. It is beyond my art to portray the suffering and the endurance, the pride, guilt and hope of a people who were in the way of unaccountable, overwhelming evil. I can show little more than what can be seen: a lingering impression of collective history and individual life in the faces of people I encountered. I find that my most successful work contains more than met my eye when I took the photograph. It is my hope that the silver images that I love lead an open eye far beyond their surface. I make photographs with a camera, as we all must, but truth dwells beyond the facts of the image.
Thus I ask the viewer’s indulgence for my decision to forego the customary little bit of information that is the caption. My purpose is not documentary, there is nothing “important” going on. The something that is going on or standing still is just a thought I recorded that contains its own caption, to be interpreted or not. Lake a moment to ponder without distraction the always somewhat mysterious world of the camera, as the little girl is doing, in her innocent notion that there must be a birdie somewhere inside.
Jonas Dovydėnas
Photographer Jonas Dovydėnas was born in 1939 in Kaunas. In 1944, he fled to Germany with his parents and spent five years in a war refugee camp before emigrating to the United States in 1949. In 1965 graduated from Brown University in Providence (English Language and Literature). He studied photography at the Rhode Island Institute of Design (1964-1965) with Harry Morey Callahan and at the Illinois Institute of Technology (1965-1968) with Aaron Siskind.
Since 1997 J. Dovydėnas has been an honorary member of the Lithuanian Photographers Association. Dovydėnas’s photographs have appeared in The Times, National Geographic, Adventure, Soldier of Fortune, Chicago Magazine and others. He has had solo exhibitions in Lithuania (Vilnius 1982, 1989, 2002, 2007, 2018) and abroad (Chicago 1967, 1972-1973, 1978-1979, Washington 1980, Moscow 2003). Works are included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Institute of Minneapolis, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the Lithuanian Photographers Association archive.
The exhibited original prints are from Lithuanian Photographers Association archive
The exhibition is partly funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Kaunas City Municipality.
The exhibition will run until March 31.