ANTANAS SUTKUS (LITHUANIAN B.1939) Sudie, partijos draugai!, Vilnius (Good-bye, Party Comrades!, Vilnius) 33359 gelatin silver print 24 x 14 cm (9 1/2 x 5 1/2 in.) unframed signed and dated on verso PROVENANCE Acquired directly from the photographer, by the present owner EXHIBITED Similar item from the edition is in the collection of Art Institute of Chicago, Reference Number 1995.292 LOT NOTES Antanas Sutkus stands as one of the most significant photographers to emerge from the Soviet Bloc - a master of black-and-white humanism whose lens captured the soul of Lithuania in quiet, piercing detail. Described as "photography’s Solzhenitsyn", Sutkus refused to conform to the rigid ideological expectations of Soviet art, instead developing a deeply personal, profoundly empathetic documentary style that exposed the truth of everyday life under authoritarianism. Born in 1939 in Lithuania, Sutkus came of age during the Cold War, when photography in the USSR was expected to glorify the state and its ideology. Rather than producing propagandist visions of heroic laborers and perfect collectives, Sutkus turned his camera toward the marginalized, the elderly, the young, and the unidealized - those forgotten by official narratives. His most iconic series, People of Lithuania, launched in 1976 and continued for decades, is a quiet act of defiance: an archive of human vulnerability, dignity, and individuality in a system that sought to erase precisely those qualities.With startling clarity and poetic restraint, Sutkus captured the fleeting moments of rural life, childhood, old age, and solitude. His images are often stark and intimate. Sutkus's nonconformist attitude did not go unnoticed. His works ran afoul of Soviet censors, who accused him of failing to uphold socialist ideals. He was never fully embraced by the official art establishment, yet persisted with quiet defiance, helping to found the Lithuanian Photographers’ Association and mentoring a new generation of independent visual thinkers. His photography became a humanist counter-narrative - a visual literature of dissent.