18 May, 5.30 pm Richard Schofield will give an artist talk at Kaunas Photography Gallery. The free event will be held in English.
Neither Lithuanian nor Jewish, the English founder and director at the International Centre for Litvak Photography (https://ic4lp.org/) Richard Schofield stepped off a plane at Vilnius Airport 22 years ago having only discovered where Lithuania was 10 days earlier. A resident of Kaunas for the last decade, Richard graduated with a Distinction on the prestigious Photojournalism and Documentary Photography MA programme at the London College of Communication in 2009, and, since accidentally stumbling on an extraordinary collection of over 100 prewar Lithuanian Jewish family photographs in Kaunas in 2013, has been committed to locating, documenting and digitally preserving all surviving examples of prewar Lithuanian Jewish photographs around the world. Timed to coincide with Sarah Mei Herman’s deeply personal exhibition, Germano, that runs at the Kaunas Photography Gallery until May 28, Richard will be giving a light-hearted and informal presentation at the gallery about his work, during which he’ll explain why he believes that engaging with Lithuanian Jewish life and culture before the Second World War by exploring its rich and diverse photographic legacy provides an opportunity to approach a notoriously difficult subject in an original, and refreshingly non-confrontational, way.
The event is sponsored by Kaunas City Municipality and Lithuanian Council for Culture.