Antanas Sutkus was born on June 27th, 1939 in Kluoniskiai (Kaunas region). From 1958 to 1964 he studied journalism at the Vilnius University. He founded the Lithuanian Association of Art Photographers and has been its director for 40 years.

Represented by Liza Fetissova Gallery (ex-Russiantearoom gallery) since 2010.

His works are present in the following collections :

Public collections
Art Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius; Museum of Photography, Šiauliai ; National Library, Paris; House of Photography, Paris ; Museum of Photography, Helsinki ; International Center of Photography, New York ; Institute of Arts, Chicago, Art Museum, Minneapolis ; Fotoforum Felldeg Gallery, Zurich ; Art Gallery, Dresde ; Art Museum, Boston ; Victoria & Albert Museum, London ; Photography Museum, Odense, Denmark ; F.C.Gundlach Collection, Hamburg ; Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm ; House of Photography, Moscow ; Folkvang Museum, Essen, Germany; Contemporary Art Museum, Riga, Latvia
Private collections
Paul Smith, London ; Elizabeth and Anthony Terrana, United States ; Danguole and Viktoras Butkus, Lithuania, Agnès B, Paris , Elton John, United-States

Few dates

1969-1974 : Chairman of the committee for creating the Association of Lithuanian Photographers

1974-1980 : Deputy Chairman of the committee for creating the Association of Lithuanian Photographers

1980-1989 : Chairman of the Association of Lithuanian Art Photographers

Since 1970 : Member of the Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers

1989-1990 and since 1996 : Chairman of the Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers

1980 : Awarded the name of Honored Culture Worker of Lithuania

1983 : Received the Lithuanian State Premium

1997 : Decorated with the Order of the Grand Duke Gediminas of the 4th degree

1998 : Received the Art Award of the Lithuanian Government

2001-2002 : Won the Erna&Victor Hasselblad Foundation and received a purse for Documentation and Conservation of Antanas Sutkus’ Archive of Photographs

2003 : Received the National Premium for Arts

2006 : Decorated with the Golden Cross of the President of Poland Republic

2009 : Decorated with The Honor sign ‘Lithuanian Millennium Star’

2011 : Nominated to the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize

2014 : Decorated with The Honor sign « Nešk savo šviesą ir tikėk » and The Honor sign medal « Už nuopelnus Vilniui ir Tautai »

2015 : Decorated cith The Order of the Republic of France for Art and Literature

2017 : Decorated with Dr. Erich SOLOMON Prize, Germany

Antanas Sutkus’s archives contain 700 000 negatives.

« I started to take pictures at the age of 13. When I put the paper in the developing bath for the first time, I saw a face appearing and I felt like God » tells Antanas Sutkus.

« The purpose of art is almost divine : revive, if it does history ; create if it does poetry » said Victor Hugo. In Antanas Sutkus images, history and poetry melt together in one and only board. Sutkus redraws with an unusual anti-conformism, and dangerous at the time, his population’s life. It is always with an honest and frank look, tender and loving, at the opposite of his habits of soviet photography formatted and censored, that he immortalizes his favorite subjects : city-dweller, farmers, children, old people, pretty women, in a word humans ans not idols, archtypes.

Sutkus searches the essence of the human in a country engulfed in sovietism (Lithuanians call this period the Occupation). His look, his pictures are only warmness and tenderness for his contemporaries, sometimes teinted with humour, ultimate weapon against totalitarism. The aim is not to denounce the system, wich is rarely depicted on pictures, but simply to remind the importance of humanity, See those portraits of Sartre from the early 60s, visiting a lithuanian’s beach, his mastic raincoat blow up by the wind that we gess bad ; he has been invited by the authorities of this ‘brother country’ who organized this little symbolic getaway at the edge of the Baltic sea, and it is Antanas Sutkus who has been chosen to immortalize this political journey. Result : the portrait of a man alone drifting in sand dunes and gusts, a bit distraught, far from his statut of existentialist philosopher.

« To photograph people, you need to love them. I stoped taking pictures as soon as I stoped loving people, when capitalism came in the country, from the Lithuania’s Liberation of Soviet invasion in 1991. We talked, at the time of USSR, about giving to socialism a human face. Today, it would be wise to try to construct a human face capitalism. »

In his photographies, Antanas Sutkus raises us on the top with humanist values and a look on the world where change is still possible thanks to the human’s inner strength.