Margarita Matulyte Bücher

The monograph Vitas Luckus. Biografija. Kūryba is a comprehensive study of the photographer’s creative legacy, which presents the whole spectrum of this original creative artist’s ideas and output and reveals the author as a cultural phenomenon to readers in Lithuania and abroad for the first time. These revelations of cultural studies and personal history fundamentally alter the outlook on the cultural processes of photography in the Soviet era. Vitas Luckus (1943–1987) was a person of the modern era with a reformer’s spirit and a prophet’s destiny. This artist was one of the first in the Soviet Union to make a bridge to post-modernism, using his avant-garde creativity to widen the aesthetic limits that had dominated the Lithuanian school of photography. In this publication, the artistic works of Luckus are accompanied by the author’s captions, letters and documents. Reminiscences by the photographer’s near ones, friends and colleagues about his work, his favourite activities and his tragic fate as well as some incisive comments by art critics bring alive this charismatic character’s portrait and lay open his cultural panorama. According to Tatjana Luckienė-Aldag, who took care of the photographer’s archive, it was important not just to compile all the information held, but to present it in such a way that people would understand Vitas’s ideas and feel his spirit.